| Popis: |
Disease campaigns have been central to American philanthropy and public policy since the early twentieth century. Combining the appeal of narrow causes and universal beneficiaries, philanthropists and doctors launched enormous campaigns against tuberculosis, polio, cancer, and heart disease. They created a new form of mass philanthropy in which millions of Americans volunteered and donated to solve social problems. This form spread from one disease to another and dominated American charitable giving and voluntarism for half a century. Federal investments in health at the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health also grew up around disease categories. These campaigns created a highly skewed distribution of public health dollars. But attempts to distribute money on the basis of public health needs never matched the appeal of single-disease campaigns. |
