Turning horror into stories: Popular health reform and the gospel of prevention, 1970--1990.

详细信息   

• 作者：Hamer ; John Faithful.
• 学历：Doctor
• 年：2005
• 导师：Walters, Ronald G.
• 毕业院校：The Johns Hopkins University
• 专业：History, United States.;Philosophy.;History of Science.
• ISBN：9780496163434
• CBH：3155621
• Country：USA
• 语种：English
• FileSize：13613847
• Pages：277

文摘

Popular health reform permeated virtually every facet of American society in the 1970s and 1980s. Health food stores and health clubs proliferated; antismoking campaigns won astounding victories; breastfeeding and vegetarianism became much more common; and the increasing demand for organic food, vitamins, water filters, exercise equipment, and alternative health care created massive industries. Popular health reform resonated particularly well in America because its central philosophy---the logic of individual responsibility---was a secular restatement of deeply-rooted Judeo-Christian assumptions about the meaning of suffering and the capacity for choice.;Health gurus such as Jerome Rodale, Adelle Davis, Carlton Fredericks, and the editors of Prevention magazine---"America's Leading Health Magazine"---promised much to the health-conscious elite. They maintained, for instance, that pregnancy and aging---human experiences fraught with danger and uncertainty---could be controlled by the right mixture of vitamins, exercise, organic food, dietary restrictions, and positive thinking. They promised to free the American people from the tyranny of Western Medicine. Yet they replaced Doctor God with an equally demanding deity: Mother Nature. Health consciousness gave rise to a new orthodoxy with an unforgiving approach toward aging, motherhood, obesity, and disease. Health reformers redefined tragedies such as cancer, heart disease, depression, schizophrenia, crib death, and miscarriage as punishments meted out to those who failed to obey the natural laws of health.;The rhetoric of health consciousness was fashioned out of the materials at hand---middle-class anxiety, biblical imagery, modern science, anti-expert sentiment, Lockean individualism, and Cold War paranoia. Even so, its ultimate purposes were psychological and/or spiritual. Popular health reform met deep human needs that transcend class, race, gender, and culture. The logic of individual responsibility was tied, in the final analysis, to the need to believe that decisions shape the destiny of those who make them in meaningful ways. Many people cannot accept the arguments of those who claim that the life of a human being is predestined---that we are all simply actors reading from scripts that were written for us by nature and/or nurture. Popular health reform was one way that late twentieth-century Americans asserted their freedom over fate.