Health and Citizenship: Political Cultures of Health in Modern Europe ed. by Harry Oosterhuis, Frank Huisman (review)

As Charles Rosenberg’s endorsement states, this is a thoughtful and timely volume interrogating the role of medicine as a component of citizenship and human rights. Following a comprehensive review of the existing historiography, Huisman and Oosterhuis divide the history of health citizenship into three analytical and chronological categories: liberal citizenship, which underpinned the development of public health movements up to the First World War; social citizenship, originating in mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary movements and which subsequently paralleled the rise of welfare states up to the mid-twentieth century; and the post– World War II emergence of neoliberal citizenship in a risk society. Huisman and Oosterhuis demonstrate the analytical usefulness of this taxonomy through the organization of the essays in their volume, but equally they provide a nuanced and critically perceptive interpretation of the historical and categorical fluidity of their classification. Their analysis is a valuable historiographical innovation that moves beyond, while incorporating, classical political theories of citizenship such as that of T. H. Marshall, established in the 1950s.

The three essays in part 1 examine the ideological basis of liberal citizenship and its impact upon the balance of collective welfare versus individual liberty in comparative European public health systems up to beginning of the First World War. Matthew Ramsey offers insightful analyses of the lack of homogeneity in the development of health welfare in France in the twentieth century. Anne Hardy examines a Victorian-era political fight between the fishing trades and local and central public health authorities and public opinion surrounding hazardous oyster collection at sewerage sea outlets on the British coast. Huisman tackles the implications of liberal citizenship for monopolistic professionalization in the healing market in Holland from the mid-nineteenth century up to World War I. He analyzes the employment of legal challenges to the restriction of consumer freedom as an antimonopoly tactic for influencing political outcomes in Holland. Huisman’s approach is directly complemented by Evert Peeters and Kaat Wils’s analysis of the conceptual vulnerabilities of liberal–democratic health policies in Belgium at the fin-de-siècle to the popularity of “alternative health cultures,” such as naturopathy.

In part 2, on social citizenship and the welfare state, the first two essays address the analytically forbidding complexities of health as a human right in Germany up to the mid-twentieth century. Larry Frohman investigates the origination of German ideology regarding health rights and medicine as social statesmanship during the 1848 revolutions and its transformation up to the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1918. Rosemary Elliot investigates the intersectionality of racial, eugenic, and social hygiene in a comparative analysis of tobacco consumption and human welfare in Germany and Britain up to the end of the Second World War. While in both countries smoking was positioned within discourses surrounding masculinity and social responsibility, in Germany its envelopment within racial hygiene led to the discredit of tobacco control after the fall of the Third Reich. In Britain, by contrast, the failure of eugenism to significantly influence the liberal debate between social welfare and individual liberty continued to contextualize the public health war on tobacco consumption. In the concluding essay in part 2 Harry Oosterhuis explores the influence of ideas about personal development as a civic virtue upon patients within institutional psychiatry from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century in the Netherlands. He argues that during this period a shift from negative and exclusory liberal democratic modeling of mental health to positive and inclusive social democratic health citizenship was brought about through a theoretical evolution of the psychology of self-development.

Martin Powell opens the discussion on post–World War II neoliberalism in part 3 by arguing that the British National Health Service since 1979 challenges Huisman and Oosterhuis’s assumptions about universal consumerist, community...