Editorial: Special issue 20 years of health.

Abstract

To mark 20 years of health: an interdisciplinary journal for the social study of health, illness and medicine, we put out a request among the journal’s editorial board to reflect on developments over the past two decades in their various fields of work. Their contributions make up this issue and, at the time of writing, hopefully issue 2 of 2016. They include topics that have been the concern of health: writers during much of this period – narratives, genetics, the Internet and the crucial importance of theoretical sophistication. We are pleased to have the work of leaders in their fields gathered in one place. In his reflection on the first 20 years of this journal, founding editor, Alan Radley, remembers the original aspiration that health: would ‘provide scholars and practitioners with a forum where they can share ideas about the ways in which health issues are being shaped and in turn shape other aspects of social life ...’ so that ‘... the study of health and illness becomes less an investigation of a particular field and more an exploration of how society, culture and biography are refracted through these particular moments’. This refusal to see boundaries around the topic of health is radical and quite a tall order in a world where research funding is increasingly managed around tighter topics, often with an expectation of research outputs that are able to be exploited, if not commercially, then in terms of direct recommendations for improving the efficiency – and sometimes the humanity – of healthcare delivery systems. So sometimes, perhaps ironically, it is the authors from disciplinary areas apparently far from biomedicine and the sociology of health and illness who have most ease in rising to Alan’s vision. I’m thinking of the contributions from English literature departments, from anthropologists, visual artists and philosophers. A quick scan through the titles currently moving through the review process of health: reveals a mixture. Articles that take as their starting point a particular medical condition, cancer or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), for example, are in roughly equal numbers to those focussing on particular population groups, smokers, drug users or others. These articles often have the starting point of explorations of personal experiences and sometimes feature analysis of media or Internet representations. Articles that look at broader political issues such as governmentality also appear as do investigations of health and illness related Internet use. So you might be forgiven for thinking that we are still stuck within a focus on illness. But what I believe makes the 613656 HEA0010.1177/1363459315613656HealthEditorial research-article2015