This talk draws on the work of the Healthy Scepticism Project, the main goal of which is to rehabilitate “health scepticism” from its position in current discourse as a bedfellow to misinformation to the position it has held in the past as an important and productive avenue for the constructive critique and reform of medicine and public health. The talk thus lays out the history of health scepticism from a high point in the 1970s when it merged with/re-emerged out of the protest and rights movements of the period before taking the story forward to contemplate why this most pronounced version of health scepticism “went” and why its current form is so reduced. It finally considers examples of how – via the disaggregation of health sceptics – we might be able to discern important points of critique and reform relevant to our own moment.

Respondent: Rebecca Brown (Philosophy, Uehiro Oxford Institute, University of Oxford)

Webpage: www.stx.ox.ac.uk/event/public-health-humanities-at-st-cross