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Revisionist or simply wrong? A response to Armstrong's article on chronic illness.

Gilleard, C; Higgs, P; (2014) Revisionist or simply wrong? A response to Armstrong's article on chronic illness. Sociol Health Illn , 36 (7) 1111 - 1115. 10.1111/1467-9566.12181. Green open access

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Abstract

This article is a response to David Armstrong's recent, revisionist account of the epidemiological transition which he claims replaced earlier discourses of ageing with new discourses of chronic disease. We argue (i) that he misrepresents a key element in Omran's account of the epidemiological transition, namely the decline in infant, child and maternal mortality; (ii) that he fails to acknowledge debates going back centuries in Western medicine over the distinctions between natural and accidental death and between endogenous and extrinsic causes of ageing and (iii) that he misrepresents the growth of medical interest in the everyday illnesses of old age over the course of the 20th century as a discourse of suppression rather than a process of inclusion. While we would acknowledge that the chronic illnesses of today are different from those of the past, this amounts to something more than the changing semantics of senility.

Type: Article
Title: Revisionist or simply wrong? A response to Armstrong's article on chronic illness.
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9566.12181
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.12181
Language: English
Additional information: ©2014 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foundation for Sociology of Health and Illness (SHIL). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1459121
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