Foundations of Epidemiology

Summary

Traces the history of epidemiology from Hippocrates' shift to natural explanations through Graunt's London life tables, Jenner's smallpox vaccination, miasma-driven sanitation reforms, and the 19th-century work of Snow, Semmelweis, Farr, and Nightingale, then continues through Kermack-McKendrick, the British Doctors' Study, Framingham, and Bradford Hill. Frames discoveries through actor-network theory, arguing that breakthroughs depended on bureaucratic infrastructure, technologies, and political will rather than lone geniuses. Closes by holding the discipline's documented gains in tension with knowledge extraction from working-class observers, colonized populations, enslaved people, and the Tuskegee Study.