Better Health For All

By Sue Lloyd, Fellow and Board member of Faculty of Public Health

During the past year the Faculty of Public Health (FPH) has been celebrating the contribution of women to medicine and health alongside the Royal College of Physicians. As a woman working in this field it’s been a joy to hear the stories of women’s lives and their work to improve the lives of others, despite the challenges, or maybe because of the challenges, that they faced.

It’s not an accident that woman have been active throughout human history in improving the lot of us all; it’s part of our DNA. Women have always been active as carers whether in an official capacity or not, this being subject to the whims of the cultural orthodoxy of the time. We’re fortunate to have seen great contributions from the likes of Kitty Wilkinson, the Liverpool ‘Saint of the Slums’ who in the 1832 Cholera epidemic offered her boiler to slum families so that they could wash clothes (this killed the bacteria); Josephine Butler who campaigned to end child prostitution; and Anne Bieznak, who opened the first Catholic contraceptive clinic, after she had personal experience of eleven pregnancies by the age of 34 years. These are just a few examples, of many.

Public health historian Virginia Berridge of the London School Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Women have played a significant role in public health in the past – just think of the work of the Ladies Sanitary Associations in the nineteenth century which were one of the first ways in which women were visible in public life. We must use knowledge of that past history in planning for the future of public health.”

Today, we are joyfully celebrating International Women’s Day. FPH is proud that from its establishment in 1972 women and men have always been equally active partners.
Many of the institutional challenges that FPH’s founders overcame have been removed. Rosemary Rue (President 1986-1989) was expelled from her medical degree when she married and was later sacked from her first job when it was discovered that she had a husband and child. Rosemary pushed against the cultural norms of her time as a woman to improve housing, water supplies and immunisation in Oxfordshire, where she was Chief Medical Officer.

It’s fortunate that these barriers are now somewhat diminished, but as public health professionals we are always vigilant that these barriers don’t transform into something else, something with a different name. We see echos of this in the #MeToo campaign.

As we move forward into a new era where women and men are contributing equally to health and social care we want to celebrate what has gone before and to hope for a truly integrated future.

We look forward to seeing health in all policies and the radical prevention approach integrated into new ways of working.

Dr Catherine Calderwood, Chief Medical Officer, Scotland, celebrates this future with the following words: “Despite the social and cultural obstacles facing women, evidence from across the centuries clearly shows them at the forefront of delivering practical solutions to past public health issues. Although attitudes to women providing healthcare have changed, I am sure that we will continue to make the same positive contribution to drive forward improvements in public health in the future.”