ABSTRACT
Health promotion has matured rapidly in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
From rather humble and embryonic beginnings in the late 1960s, characterised by a
search for disciplinary roots and an acceptable theoretical base, it has blossomed and
flourished into an international discipline and practice and found itself at the forefront
of the new public health movement. Despite this meteoric rise and the accompanying
trans-national attention it has received, it is still a relatively new discipline, and as such
struggles to establish itself along side the more traditional and the more accepted
disciplines like education, medicine and psychology (Macdonald and Bunton 1993).
