ABSTRACT
So crooned Eddie Cantor to a Roman bath-house full of women. Although we may be sceptical about whether the syllogism is or was as straightforward as Hollywood chose to present it in the 1930s, from the ancient world to the present, health has been a powerful rhetorical source in the battle to legitimate social values and beauty its primary aesthetic symbol.1 Health, as René Descartes put it, is the ‘chief among goods’ and more, the sine qua non of effective individual action. But health is not simply a fact or an idea. It is also a compound of images, ranging from ideals of beauty about the human body, to the ugly and unsettling images that help construct our approach to sickness and death. We need look no further than the ways in which contemporary norms of female beauty encourage in women epidemics of sickness and debilitating unhealthiness to recognise that the connection of health to beauty and sickness to ugliness is neither unproblematic nor unrelated to broader social and political agendas.2 When I write of
‘beauty’ then, as when I write of ‘health’, I mean a socially constructed and manipulable phenomenon and not a realist account that might claim objective truth for a particular ‘natural’ meaning.3
