Chronic illness: a revisionist account

Armstrong, David

doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12037

Cited by 32 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Work currently underway on sources such as the Google books corpus, the digitised BMJ ( British Medical Journal ) and the ‘London's Pulse’ MOH Reports is showing how electronic tools can reveal hitherto unobtainable insights into the construction of medical knowledge. 62 Political history is similarly demonstrating the capacity of text analytics to overturn received wisdom, and to provide sounder empirical argumentation in its place. 63 …”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Into the Dark Domain: The UK Web Archive as a Source for the Contemporary History of Public Health

Gorsky

2015

Soc Hist Med

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With the migration of the written record from paper to digital format, archivists and historians must urgently consider how web content should be conserved, retrieved and analysed. The British Library has recently acquired a large number of UK domain websites, captured 1996–2010, which is colloquially termed the Dark Domain Archive while technical issues surrounding user access are resolved. This article reports the results of an invited pilot project that explores methodological issues surrounding use of this archive. It asks how the relationship between UK public health and local government was represented on the web, drawing on the ‘declinist’ historiography to frame its questions. It points up some difficulties in developing an aggregate picture of web content due to duplication of sites. It also highlights their potential for thematic and discourse analysis, using both text and image, illustrated through an argument about the contradictory rationale for public health policy under New Labour.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Into the Dark Domain: The UK Web Archive as a Source for the Contemporary History of Public Health

Gorsky

2015

Soc Hist Med

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“…Indeed, this was a period when, responding to the political concerns about rising health expenditures in North America and Europe, there was a growing interest in health among economists (Reubi, 2013). And, with chronic diseases being the prime health issue in the West at that time, it was logical that most health economists worked on these diseases and associated risk factors (Armstrong, 2014). On the other hand, it is important to stress that the approach used by the likes of Grossman was very different from the approaches adopted by other economists working on health.…”

Section: Human Capital Rational Choice and Social Taxesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Of neoliberalism and global health: human capital, market failure and sin/social taxes

Reubi

2016

Critical Public Health

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This article tells a different but equally important story about neoliberalism and global health than the narrative on structural adjustment policies usually found in the literature. Rather than focus on macroeconomic structural adjustment policies, this story draws our attention to microeconomic taxation policies on tobacco, alcohol and sugar now widely recognised as the best strategy to control the global non-communicable disease epidemic. Structural adjustment policies are the product of the shift from statist to market-based development models, which was brought about by neoliberal thinkers like Peter Blau and Deepak Lal. In contrast, taxation policies are the result of a different epistemological rupture in international development: the move from economies and physical capital to people and human capital, advocated by Gary Becker and others. This move was part of wider change, which saw Chicago School economists, under the influence of rational choice theory, redefine the object of their discipline, from the study of markets to individual choices. It was this concern with people and their choices that made it possible for Becker and others to identify the importance of price for the demand for tobacco, alcohol and sugar. The same concern also made it easier for them to recognise that there were inefficiencies in the tobacco, alcohol and sugar markets that required government intervention. This story, I suggest, shows that structural adjustment policies and pro-market ideology do not exhaust the relationship between neoliberalism and global health and should not monopolise how we, as political and social scientists, conceive it.

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“…43 Important too, here, were methodological innovations in studying prevalence and causation, and shifts in the cultural expectations and boundaries of medicine in relation to old age. 44 New means for establishing causative relationships in non-infectious diseases were mobilised as academic researchers and clinicians framed chronic diseases less in terms of unavoidable degeneration and more in terms of lifestyle factors and culture. 45 In the case of heart disease, for instance, interwar scepticism over the robustness of mortality figures slowly gave way, as links to sugar and fat consumption emerged from British and international research during the 1940s and 1950s.…”

Section: The Emergence Of Non-infectious Diseases As Targets Of Colonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing the Power of Difference: Colonialism and British Chronic Disease Research, 1940–1975

Moore¹

2015

Soc Hist Med

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Recent studies of post-war chronic disease epidemiology have generally focused on the histories of research in the USA and UK. Using the archival records of a major British funding body, the Colonial Medical Research Committee and its successor the Tropical Medical Research Board, this article demonstrates the advantages of bringing a post-colonial analytic to this historiography. It highlights how the administrative and medical interests in population difference at the centre of the new epidemiology came to map onto political apparatus initially created to know, reform and govern colonial subjects. Although detached from imperial aims, British medical scientists nonetheless attached value to colonial populations on the basis of British benefit and turned various sites into laboratories to extract it. This relationship did not die with the end of imperial rule. British scientists continued to pursue chronic disease epidemiology in former colonies well into the post-war period, informing debates about Britain's own public health concerns.

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Chronic illness: a revisionist account

Cited by 32 publications

References 44 publications

Into the Dark Domain: The UK Web Archive as a Source for the Contemporary History of Public Health

Into the Dark Domain: The UK Web Archive as a Source for the Contemporary History of Public Health

Of neoliberalism and global health: human capital, market failure and sin/social taxes

Harnessing the Power of Difference: Colonialism and British Chronic Disease Research, 1940–1975

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