ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with visual clues to both health and illness. The 'discovery' of a physical clue to illness may come as a result of a change in appearance, such as the rash of chickenpox or the painless swelling of a tumour in the neck. Vivid pictures of health are not easy to find in literary sources, although writers will often use illness to explore notions of what health means. Health, on the other hand, is regarded as the body's status quo. Being healthy might just be a way of saying that we are not ill or diseased. Medical practice seems to support this view of health, in that the treatment that restores us to health is really just removing disease or illness. The dominance of medicine has tended to lead to a medicalisation of some ordinary experiences, such as childbirth, and to an expectation that there is an expert solution to all of life's problems.
