PURPOSE:
The purpose of this assignment is for you to respond to the book, Hidden Arguments: Political
Ideology and Disease Prevention, by Sylvia Noble Tesh, and to apply the theoretical tools you
learned there. It requires that you read the entire book in order to do a thorough job of
answering the questions and applying the concepts.
Part I: What were your overall impressions of the book?
1. What did you find most interesting in the book? Did anything in the book lead you to
try to learn more? What did you learn that helped to change your understanding of
the social world? Was there anything that surprised you?
Part II: Reading Guide Questions
1. What is distinctive about approaching medicine and health as a social phenomena?
How does Tesh make the case for this argument? What kinds of questions does such
an approach make us ask about “modern” health care, the experience of illness, and
the role of health professionals, and medical institutions?
2. Tesh identifies 4 main 19th century theories of health (contagion; supernatural;
personal behavior; miasma). Which of these theories do you think still holds power
over the way we think today? Why?
Part III: Application
1. Find an article addressing a health care issue (or locate a specific health care policy),
and analyze it in terms of which theory you see reflected there. Is the approach to
the issue rooted in a monocausal, multicausal, or social/structural approach? Does it
emphasize biomedical issues, environmental factors, or personal responsibility? (Is
the goal to address the agent, the environment, or the host, to use the
epidemiological triad.) Do you think that the proposed response is effective? Does it
address the primary cause? If not, how might you approach it differently?
