Medically defined "health"
 

culturally, there is a "self-evident, 'natural' idea that everyone seeks good health"
 
but this, of course, is culturally constructed: "[Stephen R. Kellert] sees an enormous gap between the sociocultural perception of personal impairment and the medical definition of deviance from a normative health. Kellert offers numerous examples from so-called underdeveloped countries where people, despite showing 'symptoms,' did not think of themselves as sick and were not perceived as such by others"
 
see Kellert's "Sociocultural Concept of Health and Illness" from The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (1976)

> from Barbara Duden's The Women Beneath the Skin A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (1998)

> tagged with #to_read, #health

> created March 30, 2026 at 9:46:36 AM


> part of unfinished everything


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unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell

selection, arrangement, and original text available for creative reuse under this licensing arrangement

authors' quoted words are their own.


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