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Previous chapters have reviewed measurements that focus on specific aspects of health. This chapter reviews broad-ranging measures of general health and health-related quality of life. It opens with a discussion of the evolution of the quality of life concept and of its different definitions. It then reviews twenty-six measurement scales that are designed for clinical use, for use in social surveys or in epidemiological studies.

This chapter explores Lu Xun and Xu Guangping's own bodies and bodily activities and functions. When they first started to write to each other, the two rarely discussed bodies, bodily functions or activities, or personal hygiene, apart from his drinking and smoking. In 1926, by contrast, they exchanged much detailed information about a wide range of bodily activities, while in 1929 they confined their remarks mainly to getting adequate rest and good diets. Xu Guangping tended to be more frank about her body than he is about his, but her references were more likely deleted than his were. His smoking was not a personal matter, but her lectures about his habit and his response were too personal for publication. Remarks about their respective drinking habits were retained except where it may indicate serious alcoholism on his part, and his claims to sobriety were invariably retained or added.

This chapter aims specifically to describe what characterises the portion of the scholarship on the intersection of ethnicity/ race and ageing/ old age that focuses on health inequalities. This chapter brings attention to the fact that this literature regards ethnicity and race as crude proxies and fails therefore to acknowledge the complexity embedded in these social positions. The chapter brings attention to the main trends observed when reviewing the literature (i.e. that most studies come from North America and focus on a small number of ethnic minorities, most fail to address how ethnicity and race is made sense of in the studies, most are informed by the essentialist and/ or structuralist perspectives, and that most studies rely on studies that have not been designed to specifically explore the nexus in question). In doing so, this chapter shows what the perspectives that inform this literature mean not only for the themes that have received attention (i.e. general health/ physical functioning, disability and mobility/ disease-specific/ mental health/ cognitive functioning), but also for the ones that remain unexplored (such as, for example, the study of how perceived racism impacts the health of older ethnic minorities).

This chapter discusses how health is viewed and valued by the Jewish community. Popular views within the Jewish community on matters of health fell into three main categories of complaint: general (problems that might afflict anyone in the adult population, irrespective of age or sex), female (those connected with fertility, birth, nursing, etc.), and childhood (those specific to infants and children up to the age of religious maturity). In east European folk culture, including its Jewish variant, the term 'health' was colloquially understood as the state of full vitality. Attributes that fell within the scope of this concept included vigour, energy, ruddiness, and even the broader quality of longevity. The epithet a gezunter yid (a healthy Jew) designated not so much a person free of illnesses, but rather someone strong and fit, even in some contexts exuberant. Aside from vitality, another constituent element in the state of full health in Jewish folk phraseology was one's aesthetic appearance. A fundamental indication of illness was the loss of 'colour', a pale physiognomy. For the traditional Jewish population, health was one of the most significant factors in everyday life. And this conviction was echoed in everyday greetings and language. Poverty was spoken of as a fever, and, in general, physical ailments were used as synonyms for all misfortunes, regardless of whether these 'plagues' were material in character or not.

Roger Goodell was the best-prepared person to be the New Commissioner having served in every significant division of the NFL. Immediately he was faced with difficult issues starting with “Deflategate” and the New England Patriots. Then came player discipline issues involving Michael Vick, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, and Ben Roethlisberger. Goodell faced heavy criticism in every case. These were followed by drug issues, general player health issues, and, most significantly, concussions. Goodell’s major mode of response to the concussion issue was denial. The case of Mike Webster and the work of Bennet Amalu was the first major development. This led to a book and motion picture with the title League of Denial. Court cases, major studies, and congressional hearings all dogged the NFL and Goodell. Junior Seau’s suicide and others repeatedly raised the issue and the NFL continued public denial. The concussion issue also expanded beyond the NFL to college football and youth football. Major research centers including that of Ann McKee and the Boston Group received donations of brains from NFL players for study posthumously. The dramatic retirement of Andrew Luck in 2019 refocused the public attention on the issue. A major problem for the NFL was that part of the appeal of NFL football was its violence, which it had marketed over the decades.

The aim of this chapter is to examine young women’s experience of mental health problems during the perinatal period. We shall argue that women who were young at the time of their transition to parenthood are at elevated risk for perinatal depression, in their first and subsequent pregnancies. Evidence for the impact of perinatal depression on children’s development will be outlined, and we propose that the elevated rates of mental health problems among young mothers may partly account for the increased prevalence of adverse outcomes often seen among their children. However, for these young women and their offspring, the impact of perinatal depression may be compounded by many other social, psychological, and biological risk factors, and young women’s circumstances may exacerbate their own and their children’s difficulties. Therefore any clinical strategies regarding the identification and treatment of depression during the antenatal and postnatal months may need to take into account the age of women, with women bearing children earlier and later than the average presenting different challenges for health professionals. Across the industrialized nations the demographics of parenthood are changing, with both men and women first becoming parents at increasingly older ages (Bosch 1998; Martin et al. 2005; Ventura et al. 2001). In the UK for example, the average maternal age at first birth in 1971 was 23.7 years, compared to the present figure of 29.5 years (ONS 2012). Correspondingly, over the last four decades, birth rates for women aged 30 and over have increased extensively, whilst those for women in their teenage years and early twenties have declined (ONS 2012, 2007). Since the 1970s, the proportion of children born to women aged 20–24 in the UK has been decreasing, with women aged 30–34 years now displaying the highest birth rates (ONS 2010). These changes in the demography of parenthood are not confined to the UK with similar trends toward delayed first births observed across Western Europe (Ventura et al. 2001), the United States (Mirowsky 2002), New Zealand (Woodward et al. 2006) and Australia (Barnes 2003). Thus, a transition to parenthood during adolescence and the early 20s is non-normative for Western women, and the implications of this ‘off-time’ transition (Elder 1997, 1998) for the mother’s and the child’s mental health warrants attention.