Vision for Public Health within a Liberal Arts College Education

A Vision for Public Health within a Liberal Arts College Education
By Richard Allan Aronson, MD, MPH

Public health embraces and inter-connects the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. It is both a science and an art. Its study offers a wide and rich array of opportunities for students to: 1. Think critically. 2. Learn scientific methods of inquiry. 3. Synthesize across disciplines. 4. Understand complex and interconnected factors that underlie health problems. 5. Apply culture and language to health, healing, and disease. 6. Appreciate and learn to translate a body of knowledge into action to improve the health of communities and society.

It is deeply rooted in prevention but, at the same time, seeks to create communities and society that care about people’s health across the life cycle. It embraces language, and it embraces culture. It seeks healing in the deepest sense - healing that is rooted in physical, emotional, spiritual, and environmental balance, well-being, and safety. Whether you are a community health worker, a public health nurse, a teacher, a physician, a social worker, a psychologist, an occupational therapist, a physician’s assistant, a champion for women’s health, an anthropologist, a business person engaged in economic development, a global health expert, an early childhood specialist, a researcher on how and why toxic stress and trauma have lifelong and intergenerational consequences, an expert on resilience, a nutritionist, a leader in public policy, a community leader and activist, or so many other paths, public health provides multiple opportunities:

1. To apply the idealism of a liberal arts education to action on issues that students are passionate and curious about.
2. To view health and healing in the broadest possible context.
3. To create new and expanding partnerships rooted in synergy, synchronicity, serendipity, fluidity, and the art and social science of collaboration across cultures.
4. To celebrate diversity.
5. To discover new and higher levels of common ground and shared humanity that provide a foundation for real, effective, systemic change.
6. To foster humane conditions that bring out the best in people – hope, resilience, spirit, dignity, healing, compassion.

Through the public health mission of bringing together people from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives to address public health issues; through opportunities to join in efforts to give a voice to those who have been marginalized and oppressed; and through the classroom energy generated by the study of public health in the liberal arts setting, we can envision a world where every child has the full equal opportunity to thrive in mind, body, and spirit.

And in the community-based learning that is integral to the study of public health, students from early on have the opportunity:

1. To learn to listen more inclusively and humbly to those with whom we work.
2. To learn to honor the people that we serve, especially those whose voices have been stifled and excluded.
3. To learn to put into practice the reality that expertise is not defined by the titles or degrees after your name, but by the unique gifts and skills that you bring to bear to make the world better.

Upon receiving an Amherst College honorary degree in New York City in 2005, Nelson Mandela said, “I come from a country that understands the need for hard work to overcome past destructiveness and to escape a threatened future. But, we have also learned that miracles happen with vision and spirit. The world needs that vision and spirit still, and all the more. We are all threatened by entrenched inequality and divisions. We all must prove ourselves equal to a better possibility. “The power of public health lies in rising to this challenge: To be curious about, to understand, and to change that inequality, and in the process, to partner with multiple, diverse people from all walks of life.

It comes down to continuously exploring, discovering, and acting upon the human spirit in all its promise, resilience, and hope, and to bring light into ourselves, our communities, and our world. Human beings can live for roughly 8 to 12 weeks without food, 8 to 12 days without food and water, 6 to 8 minutes without oxygen. But without the spirit, a certain kind of death is inevitable in just a few seconds. And so it is that an inscription found on a cellar wall in Germany written by a Jew in hiding from the Nazis contained these words: “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining, I believe in love even when there is no one there, I believe through any trail there is always a way. And I believe in God when God is silent.”