Review

Something for almost everyone

HEALTH AND DISEASE: A reader (3rd edition)
Basiro Davey, Alastair Gray and Clive Seale (eds)
Open University Press, 2001, £17.99

There are 76 readings in this revised collection — something for everyone, with classic writings from Rene Dubos, Susan Sontag, Ann Oakley and Roy Porter, for instance, but less familiar pieces, too.

This is the key text for the Open University’s course on health and disease, which would also be a valuable resource for students and teachers in other institutions. Given the breadth of its scope and perspectives, which include literary, autobiographical, journalistic and lay contributions, I hope it may come to be a foundation text in the new medical schools, too, with their much-vaunted commitment to non-traditional teaching and learning.

The collection includes readings that bring this edition up to date, most notably in the final section, Prospects and Speculation. There are welcome contributions from, among others, Tim Lang on food and globalisation, Peter Piot on the global AIDS epidemic, and Steve Jones and Tom Shakespeare on the implications of the new genetic technologies. The introduction to this section, in common with the others, does not, however, offer links to preceding debates — there is little by way of editorial voice to contextualise the contents as a whole.

The section introductions are brief and tend to summarise the contents that follow rather than offer critical commentary, presumably because the editors have not wanted to trespass on the OU course materials.

Perhaps this is not really a problem — it may just be is the teacher in me wanting more to be explained as well as demonstrate — since the extracts themselves are provocative, stimulating and surely destined to take the reader back to the original writer and their work. However, it seems that the reader has to do a lot of work to make connective sense of the vast array of material presented here.

One notable and commendable difference from the previous editions is that there are more selections from people writing about their own health or illness: Thomas Garrett on ‘living with HIV (and )…with the dosing demands of combination therapy’; Tony Parker’s transcript of ‘An interview with Mrs Williams’, entitled ‘Some bloody do-gooding cow’; and Mary O’Hagan’s ‘Two accounts of mental distress’ which illuminatingly uses excerpts from her journal and from her hospital file to reveal conflicting versions of reality.

The writers come from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines, so that the collection can also be enjoyed in the same way one might dip into a weekend magazine: excellent writing, a range of interests, different styles and viewpoints — yes, something for everyone, not just for students.