Health and Other Unassailable Values : Reconfigurations of Health, Evidence and Ethics

This compelling work offers new ways of thinking about the construction of health as a core value in contemporary society. The book examines how the concept of health carries with it important moral, political and economic understandings and is employed in arguments about how people should think and behave. Bell links the discussion to notions of evidence and ethics and considers how these values bolster each other. The chapters contain a range of case study material, covering topics such as cancer, smoking, e-cigarettes, addiction, genital cutting and obesity. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars working across a number of fields, including medical anthropology and public health

Health and Other Unassailable Values sets out to examine health as a core cultural value. Taking ‘health’, ‘evidence’ and ‘ethics’ as her primary themes, Bell explores the edifice that underpins contemporary conceptions of health and the transformations in how we understand it, assess it and enact it. Although health, evidence and ethics have always been important values, she demonstrates that the grounds upon which they are grasped today are radically different from how they were formulated in the past.

Divided into three parts, Part I focuses on the rise of epidemiology, Part II examines the emergence of evidence-based medicine, and Part III explores the broader ethical turn in health and medicine. Through an examination of core concepts including health behaviour, the randomised controlled trial, informed consent and human rights, Bell illustrates the ways in which certain entrenched ideas and assumptions about how human beings think and act recur across a variety of settings. An array of topical case studies, including cigarette packaging legislation, the incorporation of male circumcision as an HIV prevention tool, cancer screening technologies and e-cigarettes, ground the arguments presented.

Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students, especially those in medical anthropology, medical sociology and public health. Clear chapter delineations make the work easy to engage with at the individual chapter level as well as a whole.