Should politicians tell the public how to behave? Is it best for public health people to work with, or against, industrial interests? These are debates which still echo today. This book examines the way in which public health policy has changed and developed since the Second World War. It explains how public health began to focus on 'lifestyle' diseases, and looks at the debates which took place along the way, using smoking as a model.

• Introduction: Marketing health. Smoking and the discourse 1-34 of public health, 1945-2000.


• Public health in the 1950s; the watershed of smoking and lung cancer


• Medicine and the media: marketing public health in the 1960s


• Systematic gradualism: harm reduction public health and the industry 1950s-1971


• Technical public health: the 1971 cross government enquiry and the rise of economics


• Expert committees and regulation in the 1970s


• The rise of health activism in the 1970s: the health pressure group


• The new public health package


• Environment and infectious disease in the 1980s: from passive smoking to AIDS


• Medicating the underclass? Pharmaceutical public health and the discovery of addiction


• Conclusion