Health Archives - LILA Foundation for Translocal Initiatives

“Health culture is not just medical culture. It is larger, wider. Looking at health culture, it is understanding that health has always been the primary centre and concern of civilisations.” Disciplinary fields, spaces and times were transcended on December 11^th, as community health practitioner and Professor Ritu Priya Mehrotra argued for ‘Health Culture as Continuity’. “This is how we moved along, growing, properly, a sense of health care. Communities evolved, developing technologies to complement the environment, in support of the basic health requirements. Then only, power structures and social stratification happened.” In this long process, phases of biological plateaus permitted further developments: “slowly, a biology-culture balance is arrived at. The community benefits from a low endemicity… till new disturbances arrive: revolutions, invasions.”

Srinath Reddy began his lecture by stating that it is important for societies to invest in health, because it has both instrumental and intrinsic values. From a utilitarian point of view, improved health increases productivity, while it offers a sense of well-being to an individual. Health indicators of a society also indicate the amount of vulnerability and values that are shared within that society. In Sridhar Venkatapuram’s words, “a well-ordered society would ensure that all individuals have the capability to be healthy, and at a level that is commensurate with human dignity in the modern world, which is their right.” Having thus established equity in health as a fundamental criterion for a society to be called modern, Srinath tried to understand what makes such equity possible.

Health

Ritu Priya Mehrotra: Health Culture as Continuity

Srinath Reddy: Universal Health Coverage for India: Dream or Development Imperative?