Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
From the castigation and stigmatization of victims of AIDS to our celebration of diet, exercise and fitness, the moral categorization of health and disease reflects contemporary notions that disease results from moral failure and that health is the representation of moral triumph. Ranging across academic disciplines and historical time periods, the essays in Morality and Health offer a compelling assessment of the powerful role of moral systems for judging the complex questions of risk and responsibility for disease, the experience of illness, and social and cultural responses to those who are sick. Contributors include Keith Thomas, Charles Rosenberg, Richard Shweder, Arthur Kleinman, David Mechanic, Nancy Tomes and Linda Gordon.
Table of Contents
I. Perspectives on morality and health. Health and morality in early modern England / Keith Thomas -- Banishing risk : continuity and change in the moral management of disease / Charles Rosenberg -- Behavior, disease, and health in the twentieth-century United States : the moral valence of individual risk / Allan M. Brandt -- The social context of health and disease and choices among health interventions / David Mechanic. II. Morality and culture. Moral transformations of health and suffering in Chinese society / Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman -- The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "big three" explanations of suffering / Richard A. Shweder ... et al.. III. Morality and behavior in historical context. Sugar and morality / Sidney Mintz -- Food, morality, and social reform / Warren Belasco -- The culture of public problems : drinking-driving and the symbolic order i.e. Alcohol in America : the entangled frames of health and morality / Joseph R. Gusfield -- Morality, religion, and drug use / David T. Courtwright -- Teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth : morals, moralism, experts / Linda Gordon -- Moralizing the microbe : the germ theory and the moral construction of behavior in the late-nineteenth-century antituberculosis movement / Nancy Tomes. IV. Contemporary perspectives on morality and health. Secular morality / Solomon Katz -- The legal regulation of smoking (and smokers) : public health or secular morality? / Lawrence Gostin -- Lifestyle correctness and the new secular morality / Howard M. Leichter -- Moralization / Paul Rozin.