ABSTRACT
This book has established a new perspective on the concept of public health. The rationales of policy and practice may be understood in terms of generating meanings for the concept of public health. Rather than treating theory and practice as separate from each other, this book has shown how the realms of science and politics, the medical and the social have been entangled in the continuous struggle for positions of power and authority in public health policy. Before the Second World War, racial hygiene was a key concept, and some of its meanings were retained after the war when actors began to focus on other terms, such as ‘people’s health’ in the Nordic countries. Post-war language use was associated with both exclusionary and inclusive tendencies, indicating tensions, paradoxes and contradictions in the Nordic welfare model. Contemporary drivers of conceptual change include cultural individualisation, economic and cultural globalisation, and changes in knowledge production. Conceptual change also implies changes in the object of our knowledge, i.e., the human being.
