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In the 1940s and 1950s, health officials in the United States regularly published popular guides to polio prevention, therapeutic manuals for the care of paralyzed patients, and inspirational tales of the disabled polio victims overcoming social stigma and achieving success. These tracts became a potent publicity tool to popularize faith in scientific research as the best weapon in the fight against disease. The popularized polio literature combined medical theory, philosophy, public health policy, and frequently a commercial message. Long before the polio vaccines were developed, health experts—especially those employed by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP)—made scientific research a public enterprise, in which even obscure scientific questions could be laid out and debated.

In this chapter, Esther L. Jones analyzes texts by Nnedi Okorafor and Tomi Adeyemi, arguing that these authors challenge and rewrite social scripts of mental health and disability, particularly as they relate to young black women. Through examining these issues, readers are encouraged to interrogate our own complicity within these cultural narratives.

This chapter comes from Richard Titmuss's book, Poverty and population, which describes the concentration of poverty, poor diet, and premature death in certain social groups and regions. It analyses regional statistics of illness, accidents, and deaths, comparing the poorer with the richer. It notes that this careful computation of statistics about social groups and life-chances — a legacy of Titmuss's time in the insurance industry — is one of his most valuable contributions to the demographic and health literature.

Chapter 2 synthesizes scholarly work on diabetes narratives, a discussion of popular literature on diabetes, and interview data. It argues that the dominant American narratives on the origins of the diabetes epidemic emphasize the universality of risk and rely on the perception that illness arises when one treats the body in ways that are unnatural. The price of modernity, according to this origin story, is stress and the constant temptations of a sedentary lifestyle and unwholesome foods—indulgences that, because they are unnatural, cause harm to the body. Because everyone is imagined to be exposed to risks of modernity, mitigating risk is a matter of personal discipline; those that fall victim to so-called lifestyle diseases are implicitly or explicitly cast as morally culpable for their disease.

Chapter 3 relies on data from in-depth interviews with clinicians and members of the general public, participant observation, and a review of Japanese popular intellectual literature to examine narratives about the origins of diabetes in Japan. It argues that the most pervasive Japanese narratives emphasize the particularity of diabetes risk to Japanese bodies. This narrative implies that illness arises from a disconnect between Japanese bodies and non-Japanese food culture. The road to health is a return to an imagined traditional Japanese lifestyle that has been lost to globalization and westernization. Rather than stressing individual responsibility and temptation, dominant Japanese narratives stress a shared struggle against outside forces.