Nicoletta Bosco - Public Discourse and Health Policies: The Price of Health in Contemporary Italy

Nicoletta Bosco

First published 2022

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2022 Nicoletta Bosco

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ISBN: 978-0-367-42701-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-15709-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-85451-5 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780367854515

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Just as the practices involved in public health entail a broad range of different skills, disciplines and approaches, writing a bookeven one with a single authoris never just an individual effort. And in the past years, many circumstances and many people have contributed to setting the stage for this volume. The Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of which I am a part has offeredfor almost a decademanifold opportunities for discussing health issues from the whole panorama of perspectives that unfold in this text: those of sociology and anthropology, with their increasingly tight focus on patients experiences, organizational dimensions and the social representations that contribute to defining them; the political sciences, with their attention to decision processes and deliberative participation, and their call for reflecting on the status of patients rights; history and the insights it provides for interpreting the present; linguistics with its scrutiny of discourse and the words we use; and social statistics with the tools it provides for using data knowledgeably. My heartfelt thanks also go to my colleagues at the Sociology of Health and Medicine section of the Italian Sociological Association for their commitment to broadening the fields horizons and demonstrating the importance of the sociological outlook in public health. I would thus like to thank all of my colleagues who have added to the debate, as well as those who in the future decide to devote their energies to issues that, with the pandemic, have necessarily taken on new significance for all of us. Another important experience of the past years has been my work with students in the masters degree programs in Sociology and in Anthropology, the postgraduate program in Psychology of Health, and the Ways of Seeing Workshop, whom I would like to thank for their often passionate participation in discussions of communication and health and the many valuable stimuli that they thus afforded me.

Lastly, my affectionate thanks to Andrea Sormano, who was the first to read the entire text, and to Scott Kraemer, the tireless translator thanks to whom the book was undoubtedly improved. Responsibility for the volumes content and limitations, however, is entirely my own.

This book is dedicated to Nicola Negri, mentor, colleague and friend with whom I spent untold hours discussing the original plans for the book and its first chapters. I am sure thathad he been ablehe would have willingly continued to discuss the rest as illuminatingly as he has done in all the precious years that I have known him.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367854515-1

In 1849, London was swept by a devastating outbreak of cholera. In ten days, there were over 500 deaths in Broad Street alone. Victorian reformers believed that the outbreak was caused by the citys noxious air and, to investigate its characteristics and risks, a Board of Health committee was appointed to collect all possible information: from the variations in atmospheric pressure and the winds to household ventilation conditions. No credit was given to an equally sizable collection of empirical evidence amassed at the time by the physician John Snow, who arguedrightlythat cholera was spread by contaminated water (Farr, 1852). Despite this evidence to the contrary, the measures that were taken embraced the common-sense explanation that was widespread in the period, demonstrating that information