Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This volume gathers fifteen studies on the history and archaeology of public health from across the preindustrial globe. Each chapter vividly reconstructs ideas, policies, and practices about improving health outcomes at the population level in a different region, critically engaging with the paradigm of “healthscaping,” or designing environments where health can bloom. Healthscaping fosters an inclusive and nonhierarchical approach to historical and archaeological sources that capture how diverse communities developed preventative health programs, and in pursuit of vernacular definitions of health, safety, and well-being. Studies accordingly range from programs to fight fire in later medieval England and restrict the movements of poor migrants in the Low Countries, to invoking gendered spirits in central America, maintaining water infrastructures in Cairo, and creating visual prophylactics in Tibet. Tracing these programs collectively stresses two main points. First, there is a transregional justification for rejecting the concept of public health as a modern, industrial phenomenon embedded in western biomedicine and beholden to centralized states and bureaucracies. Second, preventative biopolitics predate and transcend urban centers in Europe and can be documented for numerous civilizations in other world regions, as well as in the countryside, for both sedentary and mobile groups. The volume thus illustrates that public health has a rich history and that communities across the globe defined and pursued it in different ways, using the social, intellectual, legal, and physical tools at their disposal.</jats:p>