Toronto calls in the superheroes to help with vaccinating young children against COVID-19. Who would have thought that when you think of superheroes that you would be thinking of the superheroes of public health?
Public health superheroes
There was once a public health superhero named Florence Nightingale. She was born in 1820 and was a nurse and a woman of science. She was a woman very much in tune with the human condition and a woman who saw the world in these very concrete terms; she saw it as a place full of sick people, of diseased people, of dead people that needed to be buried. She saw people in a very negative light, thinking that people were poor and lazy. This is the way we look at the world, this is the way the public health movement looks at the world. We view people from a negative, black and white perspective. Very often, we tend to see people as either diseased or dead and as either good guys or bad guys. There are very few heroes in public health. There are very few heroic public health people that you see.
There was one public health superhero named Florence Nightingale. She was a woman very much in tune with the human condition and a woman who saw the world in these very concrete terms; she saw it as a place full of sick people, of diseased people, of dead people that needed to be buried.
This is the way we look at the world, this is the way the public health movement looks at the world. We view people from a negative, black and white perspective. Very often, we tend to see people as either diseased or dead and as either good guys or bad guys. There are very few heroes in public health. There are very few heroic public health people that you see.
Public health does not want to go to war. We don’t look down on people, we look at them as individuals and as sick people, as sick people that need to be treated. But at the same time, we also look at public health as something that is more of a war. Public health is a war against ignorance.
There was one public health superhero named Florence Nightingale. She was a woman very much in tune with the human condition and a woman who saw the world in these very concrete terms; she saw it as a place full of