Health Education

• Health education


  An art that draws upon the scientific knowledge amassed in the pursuit of numerous sciences (medicine and its allied sciences – biology, psychology, social sciences and many practical arts)
• Analysis (science) and synthesis (philosophy)

  Constitute the materials out of which health education of the individual and community emerges
• Health education is dynamic and has been affected by scientific, political, social, artistic, economic, philosophical changes of the times
• Practices in the earliest civilizations

  • Eating the flesh of unclean animals was forbidden
  • Disease was seen as an expression of the wrath of evil spirits
  • Cleanliness was practiced as next to godliness, more for religious than hygienic purposes
• Hygeia


  Legendary daughter of Aesculapius, the god of healing, became goddess of health
• General assumption was that healers knew enough and that a man who adhered to hygienic modes of life can attain long life
• Writings from ancient Greece

  • Hippocratic corpus (Hippocratic canon)
  • Aphorisms
• Aphorisms


  • "Those who are attacked by tetanus either die in 4 days, or if they survived, recover"
• The Greek education played a part in the dissemination of knowledge but it was addressed to the small upper class
• To the Greeks, health is a state of being in which the various forces constituting the human body were perfectly balanced
• The Roman attitude towards medicine differed from the Greeks
• Cato the Censor


  Practiced medicine under the guidance of a commentarium or a medical cookbook which contained a large range of prescriptions
• Contents of Cornelius Celsus' treatise De Medicina

  • Book I - Diet, hygiene, and the benefits of exercise
  • Book II - The cause of disease, its symptoms and prognosis
  • Book III - Treatment of diseases, including the common cold and pneumonia
  • Book IV - Anatomical descriptions of selected diseases
  • Book V - Medicines, including opiates, diuretics, purgatives and laxatives
  • Book VI - Ulcers, skin lesions and diseases
  • Book VII - Classical operations, such as lithotomy and removal of cataracts
  • Book VIII - Treatment of dislocations and fractures
• Claudius Galen's Hygeia, a regimen for the young and the old, had influence even after the Renaissance
• In the Middle Ages, man's preoccupation was the salvation of the soul rather than health for the body
• The Christian doctrine holds that interpersonal relationships should be regulated by law
• Literature on the preservation of health in the Middle Ages

  • Salernitan regimen of health (Regimen Sanitantis Salernitanum)
• Salernitan regimen of health


  • If you want to be healthy, if you want to remain sound, take away your heavy cares, and refrain from anger, be sparing of undiluted wine, eat little, get up, after eating fine food, avoid afternoon naps, do not retain your urine nor tightly compress your anus. Do these things well, and you shall live a long time.
  • Should you need physicians, these three doctors will suffice: a joyful mind, rest and a moderate diet.
  • In the morning, upon rising, wash your hands and face with cold water; move around awhile and stretch your limbs; comb your hair and brush your teeth. These things relax your brain and other parts of your body. After your bath keep warm; stand or walk around after a meal; go slowly if you are of cool temperament
  • Take a short afternoon nap, or none at all, as fever, indolence, headache and chest cold may result from that nap
• The Renaissance period (1500-1750) was characterized by great scientific outburst and gradual release from traditionalism
• Factors that contributed to the foundations of health education during the Renaissance

  • The rise of middle class
  • Growth of the state
  • Technological progress
  • Growth and spread of sciences in various fields
  • Rise of universities and seats of learning
  • Growth of literature and the writings of philosophers like Bacon and Rene Descartes
• Francis Bacon


  An English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist and author who served as attorney general and lord chancellor of England. He was a philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution
• Rene Descartes


  A French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who has been dubbed the "father of modern philosophy"
• There was increasing use of the experimental method with such men like Vesalius, Harvey, Fracastoro, and others and their increasing tendency to individualize disease entities on the basis of clinical observation
• Andreas Vesalius


  Flemish anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body)
• Girolamo Fracastoro


  Italian physician, poet, and scholar in mathematics, geography and astronomy who subscribed to the philosophy of atomism and rejected appeals to hidden causes in scientific investigation
• Culture became more widely diffused because of the invention of printing, visual media (calendar), thus culture was spread by word of mouth
• Charlatans


  Persons who pretend to have a knowledge or skill that they do not possess, especially medical knowledge, and served as a medium of dissemination
• The Age of Enlightenment and Reason (1750-1830) was an extension of the scientific advances of the previous century
• The new health education movement was international in character, where everywhere the same appeal to reason coupled in belief in progress and perfectibility - thus the ascent of man from barbarism to civilization
• Groups that influenced the health education movement

  • Legislators & social workers (Howard, Pestalozzi and Florence Nightingale) who created, promoted, and enforced new social and public health laws
  • Medical men (Jenner, Frank, Chadwick, Pasteur, Lister and Koch) who discovered new methods of disease prevention, created preventive medicine and applied and spread the knowledge of new public health measures
  • Writers such as Rosseau, Dickens, Hugo, Stowe who portrayed social conditions and aroused public opinion and created demand for legislation
• Louis Pasteur


  French chemist and microbiologist remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases, including creating the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax, and inventing pasteurization
• Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch

  German physician famous for isolating the bacillus that causes anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera, and developing Koch's postulates. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905 for his tuberculosis findings
• Characteristics of health education during the earlier periods: based on authority and tradition, closely linked to local conditions and folklore
• Germ theory of disease


  Best known for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization
• Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch

  • German physician
  • Isolated Bacillus anthracis (1877), the tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and Vibrio cholerae (1883)
  • Developed Koch's postulates
  • Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905 for his tuberculosis findings
  • Considered one of the founders of microbiology
• Writers such as Rosseau, Dickens, Hugo, Stowe portrayed social conditions and aroused public opinion and created demand for legislation
• Characteristics of health education during the earlier periods

  • Based on authority and tradition - its sources were the classical, medical authors, empirical knowledge and folklore
  • Closely linked to literacy of the people - as more people learned to read, more health literature was produced for them
  • The audience for health literature was affected by the rise of new social and political orders like the middle class - books, manuals and articles in periodicals on child rearing were read for guidance by both the upper and middle class parents as well as the working class parents
  • Health education was directed to the individual and was not concerned with the community except when the need arises in times of epidemics
• There was an endeavor to project hygiene from personal to public plane in the 18th century
• John Howard laid bare the appealing condition in the English prisons and through resolutions of the connection between jail and jail fevers, aroused public opinion
• Requirements for health education in the 19th century

  • Purpose to drive it forward - powered by self-interest: e.g. cholera and industrialization
  • Knowledge to make it effective - leaped forward from the darkness of the Middle Ages to scientific outlook of the modern world
  • Means to get it across - handbills, councils, local boards, books were increased