Vindico: Incidentally I object to the term 'public health'. There is individual health only, which can be compared collectively, but 'public health' introduces a meaningless collective perspective that makes it seem important to control
Er ... what about...
Bazalgette's Victorian sewers?
Smallpox and polio vaccinations?
AIDS and TB tests for immigrants? (never enacted of course, far too sensible and un-PC)
Semi-compulsory refuse collection? (scroll down the article)
Dearieme adds: Typhoid Mary
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Public health
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4 comments:
He seems to have missed the point. Let him read up on Typhoid Mary.
I think you have mis-understood what i meant. Re-reading it i see how it could be read that way but that's not quite what I meant.
Of course the government can take measures to improve the general health of the public, but government lumps people togehter into a single homogeneous mass called 'the public' and measures them statistically to inform their furhter measures of manipulation.
There is a difference between improving the health of individuals and improving the health of 'the public. Of course, individuals make up the public, which is fine, but to use the phrase public health begins to get people thinking about the population as a single entity.
Not explained it very well, i know. Will try and think of a more eloquent way of saying what I mean!
Gotcha, v. You're objecting to the misuse of "Public Health". It's like the misuse of "in the Public Interest" to refer to something about which many members of the public happen to feel a bit nosey.
I take Vindico's point, which is also Mark's: there are health issues that must be viewed from the perspective of treating the public as an single entity rather than individuals, but that does not mean that all health issues need be treated thus, indeed many would benefit from not being. That you see the validity of a perspective in one context does not validate it for all contexts.
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