'Everyday Health', Embodiment, and Selfhood Since 1950 - (Social Histories of Medicine) (Paperback)

About the Book

The volume explores the shaping of 'everyday health' in different contexts since 1950. It shows how different aspects of identity affected experiences of health and wellbeing.

Book Synopsis

What is the history of 'everyday health' in the postwar world, and where might we find it? This volume moves away from top-down histories of health and medicine that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. Instead, it centres the day-to-day lives of people in diverse contexts from 1950 to the present. Chapters explore how gender, class, 'race', sexuality, disability, and age mediated experiences of health and wellbeing in historical context. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment, offering insights applicable to scholars of times and places beyond those represented in the case studies presented here. Drawing together cutting-edge scholarship, the volume establishes and critically interrogates 'everyday health' as a crucial concept that will shape future histories of health and medicine.

From the Back Cover

'Everyday Health', embodiment, and selfhood since 1950 is a bold intervention in the social history of medicine, exploring the shaping of 'everyday health' in different contexts since 1950.
The volume centres the day-to-day health experiences of diverse individuals and groups, in contrast to histories that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. It illustrates how different aspects of identity affected experiences of health and wellbeing in the postwar era. Its emphasis on intersectionality extends existing social histories of health and contributes to wider discussions on the politics of identity. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment. Several chapters explore how historians research, write, and interact with different participants and audiences. This methodological focus ensures its relevance to scholars everywhere. In problematising the term 'everyday health', it contributes to debates on 'expertise' and 'ordinariness'.
This exciting new volume establishes 'everyday health' as a lens through which to (re)examine the history of health and medicine.

Review Quotes

'Everyday Health functions as a fascinating collection of essays, but also as a practical guide and a manifesto for new ways of doing the history of medicine and health... Above all else, though, this volume is a call for historians of health to think more deeply about how multiple selves, including themselves, make up the histories that surround us.' -- Alex Mold, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

'a contribution with something to say to almost any historian of the last seventy-five years, to myriad colleagues in other disciplines, and to anyone working in 'everyday health' today'
-- Fred Cooper, University of Bristol

About the Author

Hannah Froom is an independent early career scholar.
Tracey Loughran is a Professor of History at the University of Essex
Kate Mahoney is a Research Manager at Healthwatch Essex, and a Community Fellow at the University of Essex.
Daisy Payling is an Engagement Officer at Queen Mary University of London.