Ethical Framework Of Public Health Essay

While the moral backing for public health in its current state may be sound, what many researchers fail to understand is that the many moral failings of its predecessors that color the legacy of public health internationally and at home. As discussed in the chapter “Colonial Medicine and its Legacies” within the textbook Reimagining Global Health arranged by Paul Farmer, before the conception of global health there was international health which sought to distribute health as a good horizontally across international, political lines. Under the framework of international health, public health workers became agents of a cold war enmeshed in the fiscal, geopolitical, and territorial struggles between two hegemons rather than the holistic value of community health. While international health as a framework has largely been abandoned, much of its rhetoric can be found within our current framework of public health such as the enumeration of certain parts of the world as "1st world", "2nd world",

In fact, the very idea of treating a populace as a patient wasn’t conceived until slave masters needed a way to keep their slaves healthy at the most effective cost.
As Tropical Health and Colonial Health portray, Public Health originates from bourgeois needing to sustain and proliferate the many disadvantaged and enslaved subjects below them, and in doing so protecting their own health and sustaining extractive and capitalistic economies. I begin my case study into the limitations of the ethical framework of the Public health researcher with this historic background to qualify the cases I will be presenting, as it could be argued that the cases presented are not representative of public health because they do not fall into current paradigm of global health. However, I believe a temporal analysis is necessary to maintain context for these issues and to create a more accurate image of public health as it is today, through the analysis what values it left