The Social Context of Health and Health Work

Abstract

This chapter begins to explore what is to be gained by studying health in a social context. Health is a physiological and a psychological state but it is also, fundamentally, a social state. In other words, although health and illness may seem just to happen to us as individuals, we experience and make sense of them by drawing on a stock of current social beliefs, ideas and practices. From earliest infancy human beings are engaged in trying to interpret and negotiate the social world in which they find themselves, in processes of social learning and social action. In the social institutions of contemporary society, such as the family and the education system, people learn to understand ‘what health is’ and is not, and what are appropriate responses to disease and illness. In encounters with the structures of power in society — state welfare bureaucracies, professional groups, the class system and so on — people learn what it means to be ‘sick’, ‘dependent’ or ‘disabled’. As they come into contact with organisations which provide health services they develop their understanding of how to be a ‘patient’ or a ‘carer’.