Religion and Public Health
Religious beliefs and public health today often find themselves at odds. Because of a tendency to associate religious people with everything from abstinence-only education to opposing vaccinations, it is easy to see faith as an obstacle to public health. However, the translation we read of the First Gate paints a very different picture. I enjoyed this reading because I immediately saw a clear connection with my major. Most people today credit John Snow as the founder of the modern field of public health. He mapped out the spread of cholera and found that it was concentrated in specific groups of people that got their water from the same wells. Today we know that bacteria live in that water, and when people drank it they became infected. This was a landmark discovery and he was a very smart man, but I am not sure he actually founded modern public health. One of the key tenants to the field is disease prevention and overall population health. These were achieved all the way back in the m...