The Social Meanings of Health

These past years have been marked by the emergence of health as a core concept in the field of medicine and in society as a whole. Such a situation cannot but be of interest to sociologists insofar as the relationship between health and illness, normality and pathology is “socially formed and is a key to a society’s global system of interpretations, beliefs and values.” ¹ If we start from the fact that technico-scientific medicine was built up and developed on the basis of illness, it would seem legitimate to examine the significance of this swing in interest towards health. There is in fact, a new distinction in real life between what is and what is not illness which both fulfils a certain number of social, political and economic functions and leads to the interpretation of medicine itself and its relationship with society. It is a question then of examining in what context and form bio-medical science has been led to question its epistemological assumptions. The whole community is affected by the way medical science constructs its aims and is concerned by its changes in perspective. The various social groups organise all their social and symbolic behaviour coherently into systems of interpretations and we understand health as providing a way of approach to these various productions. Laymen have several ways of speaking about health because for them the word health implies at one and the same time illness and medicine, work, education and family and behind these different conceptions of health can be understood the meaning that individuals give to their social behaviour and habits.