Health and Citizenship Political Cultures of Health in Modern Europe [Hardcover]

This collection of essays looks at issues of health and citizenship in Europe across two centuries. Contributors examine the extent to which the state can interfere with the private lives of its citizens, the role of individual responsibility and if any boundary occurs in terms of what the state can realistically provide. Following a comprehensive review of the existing historiography, Huisman and Oosterhuis divide the history of health citizenship into three analytical end chronological categories: liberal citizenship& social citizenship& [and] neoliberal citizenship. Their analysis is a valuable historiographical innovation that moves beyond, while incorporating, classical political theories of citizenship such as that of T. H. Marshall, established in the 1950s.

The essays in Health and Citizenshipinnovatively assault the current frontiers of historical scholarship in this field of inquiry and substantially advance an interdisciplinary discourse on the subject making the volume a highly useful pedagogical and research tool.

Dorothy Porter, University of Galifomia, San Francisco

 

I learned a great deal from this thoughtful  and timely  effort to understand the ordinarily implicit but powerful assumptions surrounding medicine as an aspect of citizenship and human rights. I would recommend it highly to anyone concerned with contemporary health care as well as policy history  

Charles E. Rosenberg, Harvard University