ABSTRACT
This volume is concerned with how historians and people in general have evaluated the role of families, parents, society, houses, and homes in the determination of health. A key concept in the recent literature on the relationship between living standards, poverty, and health has been that of ‘deprivation.’ Deprivation might be defined as suffering from hardship, or having been dispossessed, particularly of good medical, social, and educational facilities. However, it is also clear that deprivation can have many meanings. As early as 1976, Richard Berthoud suggested that it was an umbrella term to cover all the misfortunes that people could suffer in society, a phenomenon that was as much about the way society worked, or ought to work, as one existing in society itself. Berthoud suggested that deprivation seemed to imply a situation that was unacceptably below some minimum standard, even though more general inequality might be accepted as inevitable, if not desirable: ‘If inequality can be seen as a hill, deprivation is a ravine into which people should not be allowed to fall.’ 1 What was crucial for Berthoud was the distinction between the individual and the group, between internal and external weakness, or between structural factors and individual characteristics.
