The long, lurid tradition of public health propaganda

December 9, 2013

The campaign to get people to embrace the Affordable Care Act, and the countervailing effort to cast doubt on it, is essentially a propaganda war. And though propaganda might seem like a heavy weapon to deploy on an already-passed health care law, public health has been the site of intense propaganda wars for more than a century—sometimes with lurid, dramatic imagery that makes the tussle over the ACA look tame. (Boston Globe)