Review

Rigour but not mortis

WORLD HEALTH AND DISEASE
Alastair Gray (ed)
Buckingham Open University Press, 2001, £17.99

World Health and Disease is a textbook for the Open University health and disease course, and is now in its third edition. It aims to improve students’ skills in data interpretation – an area which I think is often taught unimaginatively. This book provides a way of doing this in a problem based, interesting, appropriate and rigorous way. It should produce critical thinkers.

It is also ambitious – and successfully so – in terms of the range of material it pulls together. It combines a variety of disciplines allied to health, including economics, demography, nutrition, history, biology and epidemiology. It considers health from a global perspective, while at the same time exploring in depth the history and current patterns of health in the UK.

I found it enormously helpful in understanding current arguments about inequalities in health and developing a deeper understanding of the competing explanations. It also helped me to develop an understanding of the use and abuse of statistics and various forms of evidence.

I can recommend it wholeheartedly, and believe it should be on reading lists of a wide range of health courses including public health, health promotion, primary health care and the sociology of health.