Main description:

Most discussions of health care center on medical advances, cost, and the roles of insurers and government agencies. With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Alan Blum offers a new perspective, outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health and health care alike. Drawing on a range of thinkers, Blum explains how our current understanding of health care tends to posit it as a sort of state of permanent emergency, like the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. To move beyond that, he argues, will require a complete rethinking of health and sickness, self-governance and negligence. A heady, cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond.

Contents:

Introduction

The Grey Zone as a primordial figure: Greek origins

Ambiguity as a social phenomenon: Reshaping the Greeks

The elemental vision of the split

The official history and the unwritten text

The relationship of knowledge to life

The city of pigs as travesty

Health and the city

On being old

The formula: Medicalization and its guises

Prosthetics

The recurrence of the body

Moods of Being

Conclusion