Historians and physicians often describe the period from the 1920s to the 1960s as a "golden age of medicine" in the United States when biomedical advances fostered the public's unprecedented faith in the ability of doctors and medicine to cure and prevent disease and led to physicians' unrivalled professional autonomy and cultural authority. During these years the country also saw significant social changes including economic growth and urban and suburban expansion (interrupted by the Depression), the expansion of the federal government (prompted by the Depression), the changing place of women and African-Americans in the paid economy during World War II, and the nation's new status as a world political and economic power following the War. Moreover, it was a time when Western countries experienced an epidemiological transition in which the burden of disease and leading causes of death changed from communicable to chronic, non-communicable diseases and conditions. There has been an ongoing debate about what made the most significant contribution to this transition, medical or social progress, but it has been confined to scholarly voices and writing.

The tremendously rich results of a national survey carried out by the Chicago-based National Opinion Research Center in the summer of 1955 provide a rare opportunity to examine lay understandings of the changes from 1925 to 1955 that affected health and who or what was responsible for those changes. Rather than being a straightforward story of medical progress, the short health narratives articulated by nearly 2,400 respondents show that they understood their health to be a function of medical, social, and behavioral change. This suggests that Americans would have more likely described this period as a golden age of health rather than of medicine. This project examines how respondents' personal experience and background, their social and professional contacts, and their exposure to media health information had differential effects on their perceptions of health. Furthermore, there were variations in the importance of these factors and the health attitudes of respondents along the traditional social cleavages of gender, race, income, and geography. In the absence of a federally funded health system, these fractured experiences and attitudes juxtaposed with a predominantly medical portrayal of health in the media contributed to a uniquely American national identity related to health and health care.