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.
Table of Content
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
About the author
Alan Blum is director of the Culture of Cities Centre, professor at York University, and adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada.
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