The Worlds of Public Health

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Public health erupted into the world's consciousness in early 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic and its multiple social and economic consequences. What had been until then, for most people, a remote and specialized field of expertise suddenly became the very basis for the government of lives. The Worlds of Public Health is an inquiry into the various games of power and knowledge at play in public health today. It analyses the moral and political issues at stake in the practice of public health, including the influence of positivism, the boundaries of disease, conspiracy theories, morality tests, and the challenges posed by the health of migrants and prisoners. This exploration transports readers from South Africa, the country most impacted by the AIDS epidemic, to Ecuador, with the supposedly highest maternal mortality rate in Latin America, from the scientific controversies concerning the so-called worm wars in Kenya to conflicts between doctors and patients around Gulf War syndrome in the United States, from lead poisoning and public housing in France to the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. The book argues that what is crucial for the critical analysis of public health is to attend to the different ways that life is valued--and either protected or not--in contemporary societies. This book will be of particular interest for students and scholars in medical anthropology, the sociology of health and illness and social medicine, and it will also appeal to anyone interested in the nature and role of public health today.