"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.

For fans of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Alan M. Kraut's Goldberg's War tells the story of one doctor's courageous journey to cure deadly diseases and epidemics. Goldberger's War chronicles one of the U.S. Public Health Service's most renowned heroes--an immigrant Jew who trained as a doctor at Bellevue, became a young recruit to the federal government's health service, and ended an American plague. He did so by defying conventional wisdom, experimenting on humans, and telling the South precisely what it didn't want to hear. Kraut shows how Dr. Goldberger's life became, quite literally, the stuff of legends. On the front lines of the major public-health battles of the early 20th-century, he fought the epidemics that were then routinely sweeping the nation--typhoid, yellow fever, and the measles. After successfully confronting (and often contracting) the infectious diseases of his day, in 1914 he was assigned the mystery of pellagra, a disease whose cause and cure had eluded the world for centuries and was then afflicting tens of thousands of Americans every year, particularly in the emerging "New South." “Engrossing story of an American medical hero.” —The New England Journal of Medicine

For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.