Health, Medicine and Underdevelopment

Lesley Doyal Imogen Pennell A growing volume of literature exists on the appalling state of health of the populations of most underdeveloped nations. However, such material is almost entirely descriptive, with little attempt at conceptual analysis, particularly of a critical kind. Thus health planners continue to abstract the problems of death and disease from their socio-economic context, and to transmute them into technical problems amenable to purely technical solutions.