The Imperative of Health, Public Health and the Regulated Body by Deborah Lupton

Introduction

This book review is meant for academics or students who are interested in the history of public health, the risks in public health, the use of mass media in public health and the responses of individuals about public health. The academics and students who want to think critically about these components of public health, should read this review to check whether this book appeals to them or not. They are my audience because this book is a really good book to conduct information and it is an easily understandable book, which is nice for students. I want to publish this book review in the ‘European Journal of Public Health’, because students will look here when searching for information about public health and this way this review will be found easily.

Book review

Deborah Lupton. The imperative of health, public health and the regulated body. Sage publications, 1995, London. 181 pages.

Core argument of the book and audience of the book

‘The imperative of health’ looks at the development of the public health. The book focusses on health promotion and discusses the principles and assumptions of public health. The author of the book, Deborah Lupton, believes that current public health research tends to underestimate the humanistic, critical, theoretical and interpretive approaches. Therefore, ‘The imperative of health’ analyses public health by combining cultural, historical, sociological and anthropological approaches. Deborah Lupton believes that public health is dependent of political and social circumstances and is therefore changing in time and space. Deborah Lupton does not belief this is clear to everyone. Therefore the purpose of the book is to reject current beliefs in health promotion. This way Deborah Lupton...

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...k. In fact, I have learned a lot. Since Deborah Lupton describes a lot of situations in which she explains how science/the political situation/the social situation influences public health, I realised that a lot more factors then I initially thought influence public health. I was surprised by the number of examples the mentioned of these influences in the past. This made me realise that there are also nowadays probably a lot of factors which influence public health. This made me think more critical about this. I must say the book is not that interesting when you do not want to know the whole history of public health, because that chapter is quite long. Furthermore, since I experienced the book as wordy, I think it is more interesting to read parts of it.

Literature

(1) McMichael AJ, Beaglehole R. The changing global context of public health. The Lancet 2000