Abstract :
During periods of recession, both historians and policy-makers have tended to revisit the
multi-faceted relationship between health and economic crisis. It seems likely that the current economic
downturn will trigger a new revival of efforts to gauge its implications for people’s health around the world.
This review will reflect on aspects of the relationship between health and economic crisis, exploring some of
the unanswered questions within the historiography of the Great Depression and health, and suggest new
directions that this work might take. Within a broadly transnational framework, I will reassess the diverse
historiographies of interwar public health, in order to highlight ways in which the methodologies used could
inspire future studies for neglected areas within this field, such as Southeast Asia. In doing so, I will
illustrate that the effects of the interwar economic fluctuations on health status remain imprecise and difficult
to define, but marked a transitional moment in the history of public health.
