Table of Contents

Part I: Health
1. Lifestyle and the Rise of Epidemiology 2. Nudging and Other Theories of ‘Health Behaviour’ 3. Tertiary Prevention and the Teachable Moment

Part II: Evidence
4. Medicine Acquires a Base 5. RCTs and the Unencumbered Human 6. Systematic Reviews and the Behavioural Turn

Part III: Ethics
7. Medicine Acquires Ethics 8. Consent and the Informed Patient 9. Health, Choice and Human Rights

About the Author

Kirsten Bell is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Roehampton, UK.

Reviews

“Health and Other Unassailable Values offers a powerful analysis of how health is conceptualized in contemporary society and culture. Bell offers key insights into how supposedly scientific ‘facts’ and apparently unassailable ‘values’ are socially constructed and intertwined in ways that make their claims to truth seem not only obvious but even unquestionable. This is critical social science thinking at its very best, and promises to make a major contribution to our understanding of health in contemporary life.”
Richard Parker, Columbia University, USA“Modern medicine seems a complex affair but this original and insightful book shows how it is underpinned by a number of foundational constructs. This broad-ranging and lucid overview explores how current understandings of health, evidence and ethics emerged and so reveals what lies behind our everyday experience of ‘modern’ medicine in the 21st century.”
David Armstrong, King’s College London, UK