Health Communication for Displaced Populations| Narratives of Dispossession: Reading Antecedents of Public Health Rhetoric in Reconstruction

Abstract

While existing scholarship attributes the development of public health communication to the acceptance of germ theory and sanitary reforms in the early 20th century, this article argues that a turn to late–Civil War and Reconstruction (1863–1877) movements for health reform reveals the central role of dispossession in spurring public health ideologies. I use rhetorical analysis of primary materials from the Reconstruction era to highlight two major narratives emerging from the social movement for public health: One of sanitation, and another of interdependence. This dialectic grounds the contradictory and multiple rhetorical performances that have historically characterized the public health system, dating back to the social sanitation discourse of rapidly institutionalizing medical colleges and the rhetoric (and practice) of mutual aid among freedpeople. The article concludes by moving from rhetorical analysis to practical implications for health researchers and practitioners confronting the inexorable biopolitical roots of public health while addressing the pressing public health challenges of forced displacement worldwide.