Health and Hygiene

Health and Hygiene 1935 - 1938

Health and Hygiene was published more or less monthly, in the years 1935 - 1938, under the auspices of the Communist Party USA. The authors were those on the "Daily Worker Medical Advisory Board Panel ... a group of some 20 doctors, specialists in many fields" as described in an announcement of the new medical advice column in the Daily Worker of August 15, 1934.

A total of 42 issues were published, and we here present every page of every one of them.

Origins:

In a way, one could look at the earlier publication Health, of which 3 issues were published in 1934, as a kind of (sort of, somewhat, remotely) predecessor of Health and Hygiene This was put out by Dr. Paul Luttinger. Dr. Luttinger also occasionally had a health advice column printed in some 1933 and 1934 issues of Daily Worker, and in at least one issue of Health ran an advertisement for New Masses and other CP USA publications. There is no mention of Health, however, in The Daily Worker of this period, and Health and Hygiene never mentions Health, or Dr. Luttinger, either.

In August of 1934, the CP ended Dr. Luttinger's column in Daily worker, replacing it with a column by its "Advisory Board Panel" of "20 doctors". In 1939, Dr. Luttinger's name appears in New International, a Trotskyist journal put out by the SWP. So one would assume that between late 1934 and 1939, there was a parting of political ways between Dr. Luttinger and the CP USA.

Regarding Health and Hygiene... medically:

I've been unable to find any material about this publication on the Web, to further enlighten me regarding it beyond what I, personally, can infer (as a physician, myself) reading issues of it.

I was extremely impressed reading Health and Hygiene issues. Its means of providing sound and clear medical advice to the public struck me as exceptional (making allowances for its publication nearly a century ago, to a slightly socially different population from that of today). To the best of my knowledge, the information and advice it gave was extremely well-considered, well thought out, and accurate within the limits of what science and medicine knew at the time.

I was also particularly impressed by its treating forthrightly such issues as abortion, birth control, and other issues associated with social taboos. I got the impression, reading issues of this publication, that control over the content was rather firmly in the hands of the physicians writing for this publication, and that they encountered relatively little interference from other parts of the CP USA in terms of any demands to include "party line" type material. The medical articles would often discuss the relationship of their subject to existing political reality, but this was always kept as very much secondary to the main task of simply providing sound medical advice. This, too, impressed me greatly... that this was a publication dedicated to intellectual honesty and good medicine, above all else.

Minor curiosity: In the final issues of Health and Hygiene, one finds advertisements for the first issues of Consumer Reports, which in its early days was at least somewhat significantly within the orbit of the CP USA.

Technical info and Acknowledgements:

About 65% of these issues I personally scanned from those in my own personal collection, which I managed to acquire in a single purchase from Bibliomania books in Oakland, CA. Most of the rest I personally scanned at the New York Academy of Medicine's library, where Arlene Shaner very kindly and generously let me work for two days, for hours per day, scanning issues they held using their overhead scanner. Recently (2019) I realized I'd missed ONE issue (May, 1938), and while the NYAM apparently no longer lets visitors scan their holdings themselves, she kindly scanned that one missing issue for me, so our digital archive of Health and Hygiene is complete.

Martin H. Goodman MD
Riazanov Library digital archive projects
February 2020 San Pablo CA

Volume 1, Number 1, April 1935

Volume 1, Number 2, May 1935

Volume 1, Number 3, June 1935

Volume 1, Number 4, July 1935

Volume 1, Number 5, August 1935

Volume 1, Number 6, September 1935

Volume 2, Number 1, October 1935

Volume 2, Number 2, November 1935

Volume 2, Numbers 3-6, December 1935

Volume 3, Number 1, January 1936

Volume 3, Number 2, Feburary 1936