June 5 & 6 (virtual): On the first day of the Institute, the virtual session will begin with a 45-minute welcome, introduction, and overview by the directors, followed by a 15-minute Q and A. Participants will then join breakout groups for “get to know you” sessions. (Participants in the 2023 institute felt that more “icebreakers” would have been beneficial to develop the community that the in-person institute eventually fostered). In the afternoon, Drs. Jones and Harris will offer an introductory lecture on the broad contours of the history of public health in the United States and its roots in Great Britain to provide context for the remainder of the institute.
On the second morning we will have an additional meet-and-greet discussion, where the participants introduce themselves further and their own pedagogical techniques and goals for the institute and then an introduction to public health by Dr. Miranda Worthen, an epidemiologist, and our lead key faculty member. In the afternoon, we will have a guest presentation and a discussion of our first monograph, The Public Health Approach: Population Thinking from the Black Death to COVID-19 (published in 2023), with the book’s author Dr. Alfredo Morabia, who is the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health.
In-Person Sessions, The Ohio State University College of Public Health
June 9 Yellow Fever, Citizenship, Race, and Empire addresses the response to the deadly viral hemorrhagic fever that struck Eastern U.S. port cities in the Early Republic, then later became known as the “Scourge of the South” in cities from New Orleans to Savannah, and plagued U.S. troops in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Dr. Mariola Espinosa, who has published a critically acclaimed book on the history of yellow fever in Cuba and the U.S. will lead this case study as we discuss her book, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878-1930. Participants will examine how social constructions of race, including the myth that African Americans possessed innate immunity to yellow fever, influenced the response to yellow fever, including the recruitment of Black nurses and allegedly immune Black regiments to serve in Cuba. Our discussion will examine the way yellow fever, once a regional concern, became a national military priority in 1898-1900, and what the sometimes fatal but successful experiments led by Walter Reed tell us about the relationships between politics, public health science, and military heroism.
Yellow Fever victim, n.d. [Wellcome Collection]
In the evening, lead Faculty Dr. Miranda Worthen will present on epidemiology as a scientific approach to studying disease and population health.
June 10: “Public Health vs. The Great White Plague” will focus on health inequities, exemplified by the public health response to tuberculosis. In 1903, muckraking journalist Ernest Poole described the “lung block,” a crowded tenement area in lower Manhattan, as a forsaken place riddled with “drunkenness, foul air, darkness and filth,” where the “living germs of the Great White Plague, coughed up and spat on floors and walls, had done a thriving business for years.” Late nineteenth-century tenement reforms had aimed to address this unhealthful situation by improving access to fresh air in densely packed buildings, while sanitary reforms sought to improve the health of the larger urban environment. While these generalized efforts had some success in reducing TB mortality, Progressive Era public health officials began in the early 1900s to use the new, more precise tools of bacteriology to diagnose TB with a sputum sample and a microscope. The growth of health departments and their embrace of police powers enabled health officials to systematically monitor, educate, and sometimes remove people with confirmed cases of TB from their homes, then relocate them to public sanatoria. Long before the advent of antibiotics, these efforts led to sharp reductions in TB morbidity and mortality. However, surveillance and control efforts disproportionately targeted people in poor neighborhoods, including immigrants and people of color, often without regard for their rights or well-being. Dr. Hilary Aquino will lead us through a lecture and discussion of the relationship between TB control and race in New York City and Baltimore, and a close reading of Samuel Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation. After discussing Roberts as a case study, participants will then break into small groups to discuss other examples of health inequities.
We will also take a trip to the Medical Heritage Center at the OSU Health Sciences Library, and view some rare books and unusual medical artifacts. Participants may arrange additional visits to view specific items in the collection.
In the evening, Dr. Karin Larkin, a professor of archaeology at University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) and an alumna of the 2023 institute, will lead a salon on how to utilize the built environment and local context to create innovative course materials. She will present on the undergraduate course and role-play game she developed as a project for the 2023 institute, in which students learn the history of Tb through a primary-source investigation of Cragmor Sanatorium, which became the UCCS campus. The salon will also spark participants to think about how they can situate their own historical and public health pedagogy in local contexts, and more broadly, how they will best utilize the knowledge gleaned from the institute to enhance their pedagogy.
June 11: Typhoid Mary, Typhoid Highballs, and the Columbus Experiment will begin with a mobile tour of a nearby Columbus’ neighborhood of picturesque Victorian and early twentieth century homes where residents still suffered from typhoid and other disease outbreaks due to sewage problems, and contaminated water and food. Dr. Jones has entitled the tour lecture “From Turrets, Typhoid, and TB to Territorial Incursions: The Resilient Histories of a Columbus Neighborhood.” This mobile tour will provide the basis for case study 3 on typhoid fever and the “Great Columbus Experiment” in wastewater treatment following the death of Ohio Senator Mark Hanna in 1904. Common Victorian-Era public health problems will be discussed during the tour, such as crowding, factory pollution, and poor ventilation, irregular garbage collection, accumulating refuse and manure, and infant and child mortality. Local efforts to improve the healthfulness of the environment through building parks and becoming one of the first U.S. cities to promote cycling will be discussed, and two areas of the neighborhood will be compared. The more recent history, in which residents during the 1970s resisted efforts to raze their neighborhood to make room expansions in the OSU Medical Center, and successfully preserved it as a livable, mixed-income, disability-friendly and diverse space, will also be discussed. During the post-tour discussion, participants will discuss with Dr. Jones the making of the tour and how participants can create their own public health mobile neighborhood tour.
In the evening, Dr. Harris will offer some examples of how to teach the history of public health through historical and contemporary popular films.
June 12 “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: America’s “Forgotten Pandemic” Remembered by COVID-19” will examine the deadliest pandemic of the 20th century, including interventions to prevent influenza mortality and its spread, the ways that public health failed and succeeded in this crisis, and crucially, why it was forgotten soon after it ended. The discussion period will engage in comparisons of two pandemics across a century. In this discussion, Dr. Harris will challenge participants to think about the uses and the limits of such comparative approaches. What is lost when we think about the “Great Flu” merely as an antecedent to COVID-19? How can we get students to understand this earlier pandemic in its original context, while appreciating its value as an instructive case study? Participants will analyze a chapter of Nancy Bristow’s American Pandemic, news reports from 1918-19, and contemporary news stories and interviews that draw upon the 1918-19 pandemic’s “lessons” for COVID-19. In the pedagogical section of this case study, participants will develop course exercises in which students might compare influenza and COVID-19 news stories to compare how dissemination of information shaped responses to these different crises.
In the evening, Dr. Dea Boster will share her expertise on teaching the history of public health and medicine at the community college level and to students with limited secondary educational background on the subject.
1918 U.S. Anti-V.D. propaganda poster [Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division]
June 13: In Disability and Public Health through a Historical Lens: The Polio Crusade Dr. Boster will introduce a disability studies lens to public health history by presenting different models of disability in academic scholarship (medical, charity, functional, and social) and will lead participants in critical discussion about ways that disability has been interpreted and contested in American political and cultural discourse. Participants will focus on poliomyelitis – a disease virtually unknown before the twentieth century that erupted into deadly pandemics between 1916 and the 1950s. Participants will examine how issues of race, gender, social class, ethnicity, and region influenced therapeutic decisions, access to medical resources, public health policies, and the success of fundraising campaigns. The session will also consider how cultural and political responses to individuals disabled by polio evolved after the Salk and Sabin vaccines were introduced in the United States in the 1950s.
In the afternoon, participants will take field trips to the OSU Rare Books and Manuscripts Library to view COVID-19 Zines or the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library to see AIDS Cartoons. Participants may also individually schedule appointments before they arrive at OSU to view other collections in these libraries.
In the evening, our salon will focus on thinking creatively about “Assignments Beyond the Essay” by a panel of faculty experts.
On June 14, we will delve into “‘Shell Shock’ to PTSD: Mental Health and Public Health” as Dr. Worthen will examine an “epidemic” of disabling traumatic illness first recognized among men who had been in combat in World War I. Shell shock was often misunderstood as a neurologic after-effect of proximity to concussive shell explosion, or as a psychoneurosis triggered by battle. We will look at the approaches to address this war trauma in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, then how PTSD became a diagnosis in response to activism by Vietnam Veterans and eventually was applied to other people who had experienced disturbing and upsetting events such as disasters or a sudden loss of a family member. Finally, we will examine how PTSD —and mental health more broadly—became a contemporary public health concern meriting population-based and preventive approaches. In discussion, participants will weigh the merits and drawbacks of applying the “epidemic/pandemic” construct to noninfectious disease.
Diptheria Vaccine and hypodermic syringe [Wellcome Collection]
On June 15, we will wrap up the in-person component of the institute. Participants will meet in five six-member working groups, each of which will be facilitated by a key faculty member, to begin working on individual projects. Over the subsequent months, these workshop groups will meet virtually at times agreed upon by members. Participants will take turns “work-shopping” syllabi and case studies, lectures, or assignments that they plan to incorporate into their own teaching and/or new syllabi developed from their experience in the institute.
One of the greatest successes of the first institute was the pedagogical community that emerged from it. To foster a similar community, the institute will feature three additional virtual lecture-and-discussion sessions after the in-person component ends. The first of these will feature Dr. James Colgrove (returning by popular demand), who will provide a virtual lecture on “The Power of Vaccination” as a public health tool. His lecture will begin with discussing the introduction of smallpox inoculation to the American colonies by Onesimus, an enslaved West African man, and discuss what this story reveals about power relationships and public health in the early U.S.; then will cover the U.S. dissemination of Edward Jenner’s cowpox vaccination against smallpox (which excluded many Native peoples despite the decimation of Native Americans by smallpox). The transatlantic anti-vaccination movement of the late nineteenth century will be considered, along with the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld a local smallpox vaccine mandate. Participants will read selections from Colgrove’s State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth Century America. Discussions will also focus on these topics, along with effective methods for teaching online (an area in which Dr. Colgrove has experience), and how to reckon with misinformation in teaching the history of vaccination. Dr. Harris will lead a final case study as a second virtual session on one of the most pressing contemporary threats to public health: climate change. For over a decade, scientists have been aware that rising surface temperatures, melting ice and snow, rising sea levels, and increasing climate variability “are expected to have substantial impacts on human health.” Climate change have been shown to harm physical and mental health and is increasing the spread of vector-borne diseases, to highlight just a few consequences. The final case study of the institute will introduce participants to this ongoing and emerging public health crisis, based on the latest available data on the history of the present and future.
On October 24, 2025 we will wrap up the institute offer a chance for participants to present samples of their projects to the other participants and faculty for peer feedback. There will also be breakout sessions for informal reflection upon the institute and how participants are applying it to their teaching. Finally, we will discuss how to maintain the pedagogical community developed during the institute. Participants will also have time to evaluate the institute via Qualtrics survey software.