rt which eventually developed a federal responsibility for public health in the US. Unfortunately, little else in this context was done for several years. On 14 May 1818, however, the Congress enacted legislation creating a Surgeon General (Baynes Jones, 1968). At this time, the Surgeon General was responsibile for both military and public health. During the balance of the nineteenth century and continuing in the twen tieth century, the office of the Surgeon General developed into the federal focal point for public health policy in the US.
Societal attitudes play a major role in the development of public health policy in the US. In the AIDS crisis, as an example, as long as the prevailing attitude among a majority in the American public was thought to be that AIDS was some sort of supernatural punishment for homosexual males, the Reagan Administration felt safe in distancing the federal government from an active role in the crisis (Seib and Otten, 1987). When it became apparent that AIDS was neither restricted to
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