ABSTRACT
In recent decades, there has been increased willingness to consider the social determinants of health in general and the impact of arts engagement in particular. On the one hand, the era of Cool Britannia witnessed the shift from a 'something for nothing' to a 'something for something' approach to the arts and their funding. On the other hand, there has been a groundswell of initiatives making the connection between arts engagement and health. The field of health in the developed world is undergoing a transformation from a biomedical to psycho-social model and from a focus on cure to an emphasis on prevention. Given the ready availability of data pertaining to date and cause of death in the Nordic countries, it is, perhaps, inevitable that several of the research teams have focused upon mortality or survival as their main outcome measure. Social epidemiology presumes a 'category of environmental factors capable of producing profound effects on host susceptibility to environmental disease agents'.
