Selling Health—a Vital Duty

Manifold Restraints: Liberty, Public Health, and the Legacy of Jacobson v Massachusetts

“…Public health leaders during this period explicitly characterized the new methods of persuasion as a repudiation of the coercive tactics of previous generations and as an American innovation that reflected the country's traditions of liberty and freedom from government restraint. 16,17 What is therefore most striking about Jacobson from a historical perspective is that the Court gave an imprimatur to an authority that was rarely invoked during the decades after the ruling was handed down. This is not to say that the use of compulsory measures vanished from either the rhetoric or the practice of public health.…”

Public Health Chronicles

“…Then the health salesman must come in." 14 One of the highest-profile campaigns to use the new sales-oriented approach was the effort in the 1920s to encourage the use of diphtheria immunization. Toxin-antitoxin as a preventive for diphtheria was the second immunizing procedure, after smallpox vaccination, to become routine for the general public, and the deployment in the community of the two interventions differed starkly.…”