Rethinking Representations of Health and Disease: Foucault, Canguilhem, and the U.S. Center for Disease Control Reports on AIDS

ABSTRACT This project explores the representation and conceptualization of health and disease through the historical analyses of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem. By tracing the historical emergence and formation of certain concepts of disease and health from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their thought provides the groundwork for an investigation of our contemporary representations of a distinctly modern disease—acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The first two chapters extract from this philosophical and historical work the theoretical basis for an analysis of the language and representation of AIDS. The final chapter then analyzes the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) publications on AIDS in the late twentieth century in these theoretical terms. The thesis argues that the contemporary theoretical basis for CDC representations of AIDS should be understood in terms of their relation to past theories of disease