Water and the death of ambition in global health, c.1970-1990.

Economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation. Therefore, because economic development and good health depended on access to clean water and sanitation, beginning in the early 1970s the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), and others began a period of sustained interest in developing both for the billions without either. During the 1980s, two massive and wildly ambitious projects showed what was possible.

"The red man and the white plague": rethinking race, tuberculosis, and American Indians, ca. 1890-1950.

From the time it emerged as an epidemic in the last decades of the nineteenth century until it had become their number-one health problem in the 1950s, multiple explanations for the etiology of tuberculosis (TB) among American Indians competed for prominence. None was more debated than racial susceptibility-and none held on with such tenacity. Various race-based explanations -Indians' inherent racial susceptibility, virgin soil theory, and degree of Indian blood-had great explanatory power.