This volume of essays grew out of a spirited debate among the editors in a Viennese coffee house in December 2002. We were attending “Social Medicine in European Perspective,” a symposium hosted by the Department of the History of Medicine, Medical University of Vienna. With the new millennium not yet two years old, conversation turned to the story of public health in Europe in the century that had just closed. As we traded accounts of the century's high and low points, we were struck by how much our interpretations depended on the vantage point from which the story was being told. Rather than privileging public health on the international, national, or local level, we decided to produce a volume that would foreground the shifting boundaries between these levels in the making of policy, the design of structures and instruments, and the refinement of expertise in European public health.

We invited leading historians of public health in twentieth-century Europe to contribute “think pieces” on a series of “hot-button” issues: the ways national and transnational institutions interacted to shaped definitions of and solutions to public health problems; the extent to which transnational communities of experts on public health took account of “localisms” and to which local experts drew on international expertise; and the degree to which public health policy makers and scientists accommodated new understandings of the sites of health and disease.