Most discussions of health care center on medical advances, cost, and the roles of insurers and government agencies. With The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Alan Blum offers a new perspective, outlining a highly nuanced theoretical approach to health and health care alike. Drawing on a range of thinkers, Blum explains how our current understanding of health care tends to posit it as a sort of state of permanent emergency, like the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. To move beyond that, he argues, will require a complete rethinking of health and sickness, self-governance and negligence. A heady, cutting-edge intervention in a critical area of society, The Grey Zone of Health and Illness will have wide ramifications in the academy and beyond.

Alan Blum is director of the Culture of Cities Centre, professor at York University, and adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction

1. The Grey Zone as a Primordial Figure: Greek Origins
2. Ambiguity as a Social Phenomenon: Reshaping the Greeks
3. The Elemental Vision of the Split
4. The Official History and the Unwritten Text
5. The Relationship of Knowledge to Life
6. The City of Pigs as Travesty
7. Health and the City
8. On Being Old
9. The Formula: Medicalization and Its Guises
10. Prosthetics
11. The Recurrence of the Body
12. Moods of Being
13. Conclusion

References