Life has become the ideology of its own absence.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 190

Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 217

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 57

The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 39

Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 77

When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 107

The dialectic cannot stop short before the concepts of health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 73

The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 59

And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1974), Minima moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German 1951.) London (NLB), 60

Public health practice embraces all those actions that are directed to the assessment of health and disease problems in the population; the formulation of policies dealing with such problems; and the assurance of environmental, behavioral, and medical services designed to accelerate favorable health trends and reduce the unfavorable.
Afifi, Abdelmonem A. & Breslow, Lester (1994), The maturing paradigm of public health. In: Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 15, 223-235, here: 232

Substantial proportions of the population did not see health as the most important thing in life - and these were more likely to be people with more, rather than less, education.
Blaxter, Mildred (1990), Health and lifestyles. London (Routledge), 241

Health is not, in the minds of most people, a unitary concept. It is multi-dimensional, and it is quite possible to have 'good' health in one respect, but 'bad' in another.
Blaxter, Mildred (1990), Health and lifestyles. London (Routledge), 35

Health can be defined negatively, as the absence of illness, functionally, as the ability to cope with everyday activities, or positively, as fitness and well-being. It has also been noted that in the modern world, health still has a moral dimension.
Blaxter, Mildred (1990), Health and lifestyles. London (Routledge), 14

In capitalist society health is the capability to earn, among the Greeks it was the capability to enjoy, and in the Middle Ages the capability to believe.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 465

[N]o entrance without any exit, no possible society without a spacious graveyard.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 467

We may finally risk the proposition that precisely because the doctor, even at the individual sick-bed, has an almost crazy utopian plan latently in view, he ostensibly avoids it. This definite plan, the final medical wishful dream, is nothing less than the abolition of death.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 465

[H]ealth is a wavering notion, if not directly in medical terms, then in social terms. Health is by no means solely a medical notion, but predominantly a societal one. Restoring to health again means in reality bringing the sick man to that kind of health which is respectively acknowledged in each respective society, and which was in fact first formed in that society itself.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 465

What is a health which merely makes people ripe to be damaged, abused, and shot at again?
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 470

[H]ealth is something which should be enjoyed, not abused. A long painless life to a ripe old age, culminating in a death replete with life, is still outstanding, has constantly been planned. As if newborn: this is what the outlines of a better world suggest as far as the body is concerned. But people cannot walk upright if social life itself still lies crooked.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 471

All in all, even without grotesque visions, every organic desire for improvement remains up in the air if the social one is not acknowledged and taken into account. Health is a social concept, exactly like the organic existence in general of human beings, as human beings. Thus it can only be meaningfully increased at all if life in which it stands is not itself overcrowded with anxiety, deprivation and death.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 467

So hardly any of the ills of the body are removed when it is seen in isolation. That is why all improvers of our situation who merely concentrate on health are so petit-bourgeois and odd, the raw fruit and vegetable brigade, the passionate herbivores, or even those who practise special breathing techniques. All this is a mockery compared with solid misery, compared with diseases which are produced not by weak flesh but by powerful hunger, not by faulty breathing but by dust, smoke, and lead. Of course there are people who breathe correctly, who combine a pleasant self-assurance with well-ventilated lungs and an upright torso which is flexible to a ripe old age. But it remains a prerequisite that these people have money; which is more beneficial for a stooped posture than the art of breathing.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 467

As the sick man does not skip and leap around, his wishes do so all the more.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 455

A Cockaigne of healthiness is spread before us, without pain, with bounding limbs and a stomach that is always merry.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 455

Exercise of the body without the mind ultimately meant being cannonfodder, and thugs beforehand.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 452

So the sick man has the feeling not that he lacks something but that he has too much of something. His discomfort, as something which is hanging around him and superfluous, has to go; pain is proud flesh. He dreams of the body which knows how to keep comfortably quiet again.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 454

But the breeding society must first be bred itself, in order that the new human nutritional value is not determined by the demands of the cannibals.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 460

Only in his brain is man the most highly developed living organism, not in other organic capabilities however.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 460

If the exploited lives to which so many are returned were worth something, and if a war did not make up in days for years of lost death, then doctors could be half content with the course of the last hundred years.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 456

The couch from which the sick man arises would only be perfect if he was refreshed instead of merely patched up.
Bloch, Ernst (1995), The principle of hope. Cambridge, Mass. (MIT Press), 456

... health, which is undoubtedly the chief good and the foundation of all the other goods in this life. For even the mind depends so much on the temperament and disposition of the bodily organs that if it is possible to find some means of making men in general wiser and more skilful than they have been up till now, I believe we must look for it in medicine. It is true that medicine as currently practised does not contain much of any significant use; but without intending to disparage it, I am sure there is no one, even among its practicioners, who would not admit that all we know in medicine is almost nothing in comparison with what remains to be known, and that we might free ourselves from innumerable diseases, both of the body and of the mind, and perhaps even from the informity of old age, if we had sufficient knowledge of their causes and of all the remedies that nature has provided.
Descartes, Rene (1988), Selected philosophical writings. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press), 47

Failure to regulate powerful concerns which damage health serves to perpetuate the freedom of choice of those with a great deal of power (major business and others with vested interests in unhealthful products or activities) to exploit those with relatively little (the public).
Downie, R.S., Fyfe, C. & Tannahill, A. (1990), Health promotion. Models and values. Oxford (Oxford University Press), 1990, 55

It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.
Dubos, René (1987), Mirage of Health. Utopias, progress, and biological change. New Brunswick (Rutgers University Press), 215

Clearly, health and disease cannot be defined merely in terms of anatomical, physiological, or mental attributes. Their real measure is the ability of the individual to function in a manner acceptable to himself and to the group of which he is a part.
Dubos, René (1987), Mirage of Health. Utopias, progress, and biological change. New Brunswick (Rutgers University Press), 261

One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.
Dubos, René (1987), Mirage of health. Utopias, progress, and biological change. New Brunswick (Rutgers University Press), 25

Personally, I regard bureaucratization as an endemic mental disease of the highest contagiousness and high susceptibility. Very few people seem to be immune. Age obviously offers no protection, on the contrary young people may be hopelessly affected from the very beginning of their administrative careers. The splitting up of the unity of the human being into categories, the establishment of water-tight compartments between service organizations, the growth of paper and desk decisions, promotion based on years of experience instead of on qualifications and qualities, all these must be regarded as malignant tumours in the health services of today, not to speak of the belief which always grows in any bureaucracy that problems can be solved by circulars and regulations instead of by field work. To my mind bureaucratization is the greatest instrinsic enemy of any service organization dealing with human beings and their problems.
Evang, Karl (1960), Health service, society, and medicine. Present day health services in their relation to medical science and social structures. London (Oxford University Press), 139

Money has, as we know, no value in itself. It is a convenient yardstick for a large number of material values. But the health and life of an individual as well as the health of a nation cannot be measured by that yardstick. If we, entrusted with protecting and defending the health of the population, give in to a salesman's scale of values we are lost.
Evang, Karl (1960), Health service, society, and medicine. Present day health services in their relation to medical science and social structures. London (Oxford University Press), 18-19

To state that the cost of proper medical care itself surpasses the financial resources of any of the countries in the West is of course ridiculous, not the least when one considers the other purposes for which money is freely being used and working hours spent.
Evang, Karl (1960), Health service, society, and medicine. Present day health services in their relation to medical science and social structures . London (Oxford University Press), 19

... the new public health addresses the systematic efforts to identify health needs and organize comprehensive services with a well-defined population base. (...) Public health encompasses the more narrow concept of medical care, but not in its technical and interpersonal aspects as applied to individuals in clinical situations, but rather in its organizational dimension as related to well-defined groups of providers and users. In addition, public health includes coordination of those actions that have an impact on the health of the population, although they go beyond health services strictly speaking.
Frenk, Julio (1993), The new public health. In: Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 14, 469-490, here: 477

It wasn't a healthy attitude, but it wasn't really a healthy world.
Friedman, Kinky (1993), A case of Lone Star. New York (Wings Books), 391

He looked a shade too healthy and nobody likes that. Particularly in New York.
Friedman, Kinky (1993), Greenwich Killing Time. New York (Wings Books), 42

The main health hazard in the world today is people who don't love themselves.
Friedman, Kinky (1993), When the cat's away. New York (Wings Books), 531

Lifestyles are characteristically attached to, and expressive of, specific milieux of action. Lifestyle options are thus often decisions to become immersed in those milieux, at the expense of the possible alternatives.
(...)
A lifestyle sector concerns a time-space 'slice' of an individual's overall activities, within which a reasonably consistent and ordered set of practices is adopted and enacted. Lifestyle sectors are aspects of the regionalisation of activities. A lifestyle sector can include, for instance, what one does on certain evenings of the week, or at weekends, as contrasted to other parts of the week; a friendship, or marriage, can also be a lifestyle sector in so far as it is made internally cohesive by distinctive forms of elected behaviour across time-space.
Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge (Polity Press), 83

A lifestyle involves a cluster of habits and orientations, and hence has a certain unity - important to a continuing sense of ontological security - that connects options in a more or less ordered pattern. (...) [T]he selection or creation of lifestyles is influenced by group pressures and the visibility of role models, as well as by socioeconomic circumstances.
Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge (Polity Press), 82

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.
Giddens, Anthony (1991), Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge (Polity Press), 56

In history, in social life, nothing is fixed, rigid or definitive. And nothing ever will be.
Gramsci, Antonio (1985), Selections from cultural writings. London (Lawrence & Wishart), 31

He who by profession has become a slave of trivial details is the victim of bureaucracy.
Gramsci, Antonio (1985), Selections from cultural writings. London (Lawrence & Wishart), 381

The human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pain and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed.
Hippocrates (1978), Hippocratic writings. Edited with an introduction by G.E.R. Lloyd. Harmondsworth (Penguin), 262

A wise man ought to realize that health is his most valuable possession and learn how to treat his illnesses by his own judgement.
Hippocrates (1978), Hippocratic writings. Edited with an introduction by G.E.R. Lloyd. Harmondsworth (Penguin), 276

Public health is the science and art of promoting health. It does so based on the understanding that health is a process engaging social, mental, spiritual and physical well-being. Public health acts on the knowledge that health is a fundamental resource to the individual, to the community and to society as a whole and must be supported by soundly investing in living conditions that create, maintain and protect health.
Kickbusch, Ilona (1989), Good planets are hard to find. Copenhagen (WHO-EURO, Healthy Cities Papers, No 5), 13

Instead of changing our mechanistic workplaces to make them safer and more conducive to the human body, we can screen, monitor, or change the bodies of workers so that they better fit the modern workplace.
Our association of the body with "efficient machines" has crept into our culture in ways other than work. It has created a modern body type in the machine's image - what one commentator has called "techno-body". The techno-body ideal, for men, and increasingly for women, is the "lean, mean machine": a hairless, overly muscled body, occasionally oiled, which very much resembles a machine. For many body zealots, the healthy body is one that functions and looks like an "efficient machine", not a body that is functioning in a natural and holistic fashion.
Kimbrell, Andrew (1993), The human body shop. The engineering and marketing of life. San Francisco (HarperCollins), 249

Maxim 193:
The sicknesses of the soul have their ups and downs like those of the body; what we take to be a cure is most often merely a respite or change of disease.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 61

Maxim 44:
Strength and weakness of mind are misnomers; they are really nothing but the good or bad health of our bodily organs.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 42

Maxim 188:
Spiritual health is no more stable than bodily; and though we may seem unaffected by the passions we are just as liable to be carried away by them as to fall ill when in good health.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 61

Maxime 593:
Sobriety is concern for one's health - or limited capacity.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 118

Maxim 633:
To safeguard one's health at the cost of too strict a diet is a tiresome illness indeed.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 124

Maxim 541:
Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 108

Maxim 542:
As the great ones of this world are unable to bestow health of body or peace of mind, we always pay too high a price for any good they can do.
La Rochefoucauld (1959), Maxims. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. London (Penguin), 109

What tends to happen in these and other areas of public health concern, then, is that health policy becomes a soldier in the war not only to reduce human misery, but also to save money, souls, and social values.
Leichter, Howard M. (1991), Free to be foolish. Politics and health promotion in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton, N.J. (Princeton University Press), 95

Not every health problem can be "the most serious of our time", yet virtually all of them are presented as such. (...) There is thus the risk that we will become either anesthetized or hysterical in the face of the apocalyptic claims on behalf of a multitude of health problems, many of which originate in our own carelessness. Although the extreme reactions of either an excessively intrusive and paternalist government or a "careless, lounging" one are not viable, there is the potential that government will either do too much, and thereby substantially reduce individual freedom, or too little, and thereby unwittingly contribute to the personal tragedies and social costs associated with avoidable deaths and illnesses.
Leichter, Howard M. (1991), Free to be foolish. Politics and health promotion in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton, N.J. (Princeton University Press), 255

... although the reduction of stress, increased recreational activity, and wiser eating habits all may be indicated for healthier lives, such choices may be made impossible, or at least considerably more difficult, given the educational, economic, and cultural constraints of those living at or near the poverty line.
Leichter, Howard M. (1991), Free to be foolish. Politics and health promotion in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton, N.J. (Princeton University Press), 85

Clearly, society, and public policymakers, respond differently to innocent victims of disease than they do to those who have caused their own ill health through foolish (or perhaps immoral) life-style choices.
Leichter, Howard M. (1991), Free to be foolish. Politics and health promotion in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton, N.J. (Princeton University Press), 81

Rarely in history has public health policy had as its sole purpose the promotion of good health or the prevention of disease. As often as not, it has sought to secure other critical social and political values, including moral renewal, reduction of power, improved economic efficiency, and strengthening of national defense.
Leichter, Howard M. (1991), Free to be foolish. Politics and health promotion in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton, N.J. (Princeton University Press), 32

Prostitution and venereal disease became great issues because of their larger social and political implications, not because of the health risks they posed.
Leichter, Howard M. (1991), Free to be foolish. Politics and health promotion in the United States and Great Britain. Princeton, N.J. (Princeton University Press), 56

The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health.
There are two organisms whose processes of self-renewal have been subjected to human interference and control. One of these is man himself (medicine and public health). The other is land (agriculture and coservation).
The effort to control the health of land has not been very successful.
Leopold, Aldo (1970), A Sand County Almanac. New York (Ballantine Books), here: 272

Good health has become a new ritual of patriotism, a market place for the public display of secular faith in the power of will.
Levin, Roger (1987), Cancer and the self: How illness constellates meaning. In: Levin, D.M. (ed.), Pathologies of the modern self. Postmodern studies on narcissism, schizophrenia, and depression. New York/London (New York University Press), 163-197, here: 165

Low income is related to poorer housing, poorer diet, fewer social amenities, worse working conditions. (...) After adjustment for age, sex, race, smoking, alcohol consumption, sleep habits, leisure-time physical activity, chest pain, diabetes, or cancer, there was still an increase risk of 1.6 for those with inadequate incomes.
Marmot, M.G., Kogevinas, M. & Elston, M.A. (1987), Social/economic status and disease. In: Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 8, 111-135, here: 129

... social environment in childhood affects achieved adult height, life chances, and ultimately mortality rates in adult life. (...)
... social circumstances acting in childhood do have a persisting effect on adult disease rates, in addition to influences acting in adulthood.
Marmot, M.G., Kogevinas, M. & Elston, M.A. (1987), Social/economic status and disease. In: Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 8, 111-135, here: 128

The social forces affecting health are expressed in class structure. This division into classes encompasses economic, political, and cultural differences, all of which may have an impact on health. At the very least, differences in health and disease by social class point to the importance of the social environment. Within medicine, the tradition is to focus on individuals: individual differences in biological makeup, in disease, in lifestyle, and in choices about health. The implication is that such disease that is not genetically determined is determined by individual exposure. While this supposition is not necessarily incorrect, it is incomplete.
Marmot, M.G., Kogevinas, M. & Elston, M.A. (1987), Social/economic status and disease. In: Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 8, 111-135, here: 112

General improvements in health/decline in mortality do not affect all classes equally. As mortality rates fall, social inequalities commonly widen.
Marmot, M.G., Kogevinas, M. & Elston, M.A.(1987), Social/economic status and disease. In: Annual Review of Public Health, Vol. 8, 111-135, here: 114

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom", a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions - North and South, black and white, labor and management - but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.
O'Rourke, P.J. (1987), Republican Party Reptile. The confessions, adventures, essays and other outrages of P.J. O'Rourke. London (Picador), 40

The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy - a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting "Sieg Health" and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind.
O'Rourke, P.J. (1987), Republican Party Reptile. The confessions, adventures, essays and other outrages of P.J. O'Rourke. London (Picador), 41-42

Remember, your body needs 6 to 8 glasses of fluid daily. Straight up or on the rocks.
O'Rourke, P.J. (1993), The bachelor home companion. A practical guide to keeping house like a pig. Sydney (Picador), 57

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Pirsig, Robert M. (1991), Lila. An inquiry into morals. New York (Bantam Books), 335

Public health (...) represents an organised response to the protection and promotion of human health and encompasses a concern with the environment, disease control, the provision of health care, health education and health promotion.
Research Unit in Health and Behavioural Change, University of Edinburgh (1989), Changing the public health. Chichester (Wiley), xvii

... public health is about social systems and collective decision-making rather than being exclusively about the isolated activities of individual members of the public.
Research Unit in Health and Behavioural Change, University of Edinburgh (1989), Changing the public health. Chichester (Wiley), xiii

... the idea of a sharp distinction between health and disease is a medical artefact for which nature, if consulted, provides no support.
Rose, Geoffrey (1992), The strategy of preventive medicine. Oxford (Oxford University Press), 6

The essential determinants of the health of society are thus to be found in its mass characteristics: the deviant minority can only be understood when seen in its societal context, and effective prevention requires changes which involve the population as a whole.
Rose, Geoffrey (1992), The strategy of preventive medicine. Oxford (Oxford University Press), vii

Social norms rigidly constrain how we live, and individuals who transgress the limits can expect trouble. We may think that our personal life-style represents our own free choice, but that belief is often mistaken. It is hard to be a non-smoker in a smoking milieu, or vice versa, and it may be impossible to eat very differently from one's family and associates. Social norms set rigid limits on diversity, and those wishing to persuade minorities to be different from the majority would do well to remember the rooks.
Rose, Geoffrey (1992), The strategy of preventive medicine. Oxford (Oxford University Press), 56

In a democracy the ultimate responsibility for decisions on health policy should lie with the public. At present that does not happen.
Rose, Geoffrey (1992), The strategy of preventive medicine. Oxford (Oxford University Press), 124

For 'wellness', naturally, is no cause for complaint - people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill - not well ... Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'.
Sacks, Oliver (1986), The man who mistook his wife for a hat. London (Picador), 84

Enhancement not only allows the possibilities of a healthy fullness and exuberance, but of a rather ominous extravagance, aberration, monstrosity ... This danger is built into the very nature of growth and life. Growth can become over-growth, life 'hyper-life' ... The paradox of an illness which can present as wellness - as a wonderful feeling of health and well-being, and only later reveal its malignant potentials - is one of the chimaeras, tricks and ironies of nature.
Sacks, Oliver (1986), The man who mistook his wife for a hat. London (Picador), 83

Of course, everyone wants to be healthy. The amusing thing is no one's really sure how to do it.
Seinfeld, Jerry (1995), SeinLanguage. New York (Bantam Books), 36

Our tradition in this country has not been to deny health information to interested individuals when they claim that they can handle it and are willing to pay for the cost of getting it.
Shapiro, Robert (1992), The human blueprint. The race to unlock the secrets of our genetic code. New York (Bantam Books), 158

Science becomes a propaganda of quack cures, manufactured by companies in which the rich hold shares, for the diseases of the poor who need only better food and sanitary houses, and of the rich who need only useful occupation, to keep them both in health.
Shaw, Bernard (1982), The intelligent woman's guide to socialism, capitalism, sovietism & fascism. Harmondsworth (Penguin), 95

Where once it was the physician who waged bellum contra morbum, the war against disease, now it's the whole society.
Sontag, Susan (1989), AIDS and its metaphor. London (Penguin), 10

[M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.
Sontag, Susan (1989), AIDS and its metaphor. London (Penguin), 9

The only ideals allowed are healthy ones - those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.
Sontag, Susan (1993), The volcano lover. A romance. London (Vintage Books), 197

Health hype is like any other kind of hype. It exaggerates. It overstates the case. Whatever the facts may be, health hype feels compelled to magnify them. (6)
Health hype has made health hot. (7)
Taylor, Robert L. (1990), Health fact, health fiction. Getting through the media maze. Dallas, TX (Taylor publishing Company), 6, 7

The concept of public health (...) is that of a major governmental and social activity, multidisciplinary in nature and extending to almost all aspects of society. Here the keyword is "health", not "medicine". The universe of concern is the health of the public, not the discipline of medicine.
Terris, Milton (1992), Current trends in public health in the Americas. In: Pan American Health Organization (ed.), The crisis of public health. Reflections for the debate. Washington, D.C. (PAHO), 166-183, here: 178

If advocates of personal prevention hope for really effective disease prevention, they do have a responsibility to presribe social prevention as preeminent and to put individual action in a context that indicates its surrogate role. The very notion that individual people can be conceptually separated from the society in which they live needs examination. In other words: the individual-social dichotomy itself is questionable.
Tesh, Sylvia N. (1990), Hidden arguments. Political ideology and disease prevention policy. New Brunswick (Rutgers University Press), 83

... class differences in health represent a double injustice: life is short where its quality is poor.
Wilkinson, Richard G., Socio-economic differences in mortality: interpreting the data on their size and trends. In: Wilkinson, Richard G. (ed.), Class and health. Research and longitudinal data. London (Tavistock), 1986, 1-20, here: 2

Improved health contributes to economic growth in four ways: it reduces production losses caused by worker illness; it permits the use of natural resources that had been totally or nearly inaccessible because of disease; it increases the enrollment of children in school and makes them better able to learn; and it frees for alternative uses resources that would otherwise have to be spent on treating illness.
World Bank (1993), World development report 1993. New York (Oxford University Press), 17

World health spending - and thus also the potential for misallocation, waste, and inequitable distribution of resources - is huge. For the world as a whole in 1990, public and private expenditure on health services was about $1,700 billion, or 8 percent of total world product. High-income countries spent almost 90 percent of this amount, for an average of $1,500 per person. The United States alone consumed 41 percent of the global total - more than 12 percent of its gross national product (GNP). Developing countries spent about $170 billion, or 4 percent of their GNP, for an average of $41 per person - less than on-thirtieth the amount spent by rich countries.
World Bank (1993), World development report 1993. New York (Oxford University Press), 4

Serious environmental health problems are shared by both developed and developing countries, affecting:
- hundreds of millions of people who suffer from respiratory and other diseases caused or exacerbated by biological and chemical agents, including tobacco smoke, in the air, both indoors and outdoors;
- hundreds of millions who are exposed to unnecessary chemical and physical hazards in their home, workplace, or wider environment (including 500.000 who die and tens of millions more who are injured in road accidents each year).
Health also depends on whether people can obtain food, water, and shelter. Over 100 million people lack the income or land to meet such basic needs. Hundreds of million suffer from undernutrition.
World Health Organization (1992), Our planet, our health. Report of the WHO Commission on Health and Environment. Geneva (WHO), XIII

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.
World Health Organization (1946), Constitution. Geneva (WHO)

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