Intervening in communities: challenges for public health.

involved, as the valuable role of historical analysis in the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic showed. Scally and Womack’s paper recalls the role of history teaching of public health professionals by Sidney Chave. They mention the history study unit we run at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Nevertheless history struggles to find a role in the increasingly crowded training curriculum. Search the UK Faculty of Public Health web site training sections and you will find little, if any, reference to history. Health economics, epidemiology, statistics, the ‘‘behavioural sciences’’ (not history) now take precedence. The emphasis is on the here and now— valuable, but it does not lead us to question how we got to the present and how the past may offer different models. This is an area that urgently needs to be looked at and to be built in more centrally to public health training. Some medical and public health schools already have professional historians in post and others could follow this example. The professional training curriculums could be revised to incorporate history. There is still much that remains to be done to increase the interaction of history with public health. Multidisciplinary public health is the latest variant of a long series of historical reconstructions. Is it willing to subject itself to the lens of history?