ABSTRACT

We live in an age where older, often discredited models of health and illness, therapy and cure, seem to be reappearing with a speed that is staggering. Anxieties about global health and the geographic origins of disease, about the biological categories through which we understand human illness, about social changes and human sexuality, in debates about the ethics of surgical interventions based on older moral charges of “vanity,” about body shape and health have all reappeared over the past decade. And they have appeared in the most diverse national contexts (such as Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the People’s Republic of China). A renewed emphasis on prognosis (a quality of Hippocratic medicine), clothed as “predictive health,” as well as diagnosis looms large on the medical horizon with the implications and promises of the deciphering of the human genome.