This transdisciplinary volume outlines the development of public health paradigms across the ages in a global context and argues that public health has seemingly lost its raison d'etre, that is, a population perspective. The older, philosophical approach in public health involved a holistic, population-based understanding that emphasized historicity and interrelatedness to study health and disease in their larger socio-economic and political moorings. A newer tradition, which developed in the late 19th century following the acceptance of the germ theory in medicine, created positivist...