Editor's Note
The Not-So-Public Health Field
Public health is a quiet field. It doesn’t have its own TV program—no green-scrub-suited ER doctors putting out 15 medical fires in half-hour segments, no glamorous forensic CSI pathologists solving murder after murder armed only with their DNA probes, and (harkening back to another era) no macho Ben Caseys resecting brain tumors without disturbing a hair on their head or chest. Ironically, public health doesn’t have much of a public presence.
Ask your average man on the street what his internist does and he can give you a rough idea. Ask him what a general surgeon does and, perhaps influenced by his TV watching, he can come close. But ask him what public health is all about, and I suspect he will stammer and stutter and change the subject. For something so crucial to the health of our communities and the individuals in those communities, public health keeps a very low profile.
Part of that invisibility may be the lack of a public personality. Nationally, the head of the CDC and the Surgeon General are the most recognized faces of public health; but they get airtime on the 6 p.m. news only when the latest epidemic erupts or a disease makes the front page. Similarly, local officials such as Minnesota Commissioner of Health Sanne Magnan or state epidemiologist Ruth Lynfield labor behind the curtains at the Legislature or at the bench in the Department of Health’s labs, making only occasional media appearances. This month’s Minnesota Medicine aims to give them and public health some airtime, exploring who the people are that keep our state safe, how they do it, and how it relates to medicine.
Public health in Minnesota really should be well-known. We have a long history of efforts that dates from the 19th-century work of our “apostle of public health,” Charles Hewitt (p. 8), to the initiatives of the “cheerleader of public health” John Finnegan Jr., who pilots a thriving school of public health at the University of Minnesota (p. 10). And we have doctors who have recognized that the roots of the diseases they see in the exam room lie not just in the genes or metabolic pathways their patients inherit but in the society and culture they inhabit. These physicians are willing to add hours of schooling to pursue a master’s in public health to find societal cures for those diseases (p. 26).
Public health may never be glitzy. After all, its methods and solutions are slow—decades-long studies that look at populations and preventive interventions that take years to implement and assess; its patient (populations), doesn’t have a face; and its cures don’t involve whisking patients off for lifesaving last-minute surgery.
Public health solutions aren’t dramatic in a Hollywood sort of way. But with a little imagination, I could envision a reality TV show with a dapper Sanjay Gupta-type articulating the lifesaving actions of an intrepid cadre of MPHs. There probably is drama to be found and excitement to mine. But more likely, public health will never make primetime. It will just keep ensuring the public’s health very quietly.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief Dr. Meyer can be reached at cmeyer1@fairview.org