Common Enemies

Know about the book -

Common Enemies is written by Rachel Kahn Best and published by Oxford University Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 019091842X (ISBN 10) and 9780190918422 (ISBN 13).

For over a hundred years, millions of Americans have joined together to fight a common enemy by campaigning against diseases. In Common Enemies, Rachel Kahn Best asks why disease campaigns have dominated a century of American philanthropy and health policy and how the fixation on diseases shapes efforts to improve lives. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses in an unprecedented history of disease politics, Best shows that to achieve consensus, disease campaigns tend to neglect stigmatized diseases and avoid controversial goals. But despite their limitations, disease campaigns do not crowd out efforts to solve other problems. Instead, they teach Americans to give and volunteer and build up public health infrastructure, bringing us together to solve problems and improve our lives.