The ostrich, the albatross, and public health: an ecosocial perspective--or why an explicit focus on health consequences of discrimination and deprivation is vital for good science and public health practice.

Concern for social inequalities in health in the United States is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream public health and health research agenda. Responding to organized efforts within and outside the health sector, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is supporting programs dedicated to eliminating social disparities in health, and within DHHS, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are supporting research into health disparities. The NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health (founded in 1990) and the new National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (including socioeconomic disparities) are, for example, focusing attention on multiple health outcomes in relation to specified social determinants, rather than parsing out ailments solely by body parts. At issue are ways in which population patterns of health, disease, and well-being, from conception to death, reflect societal conditions, including social inequality, across the lifecourse

Saving the Child for the Sake of the Nation: Moral Framing and the Civic, Moral and Religious Redemption of Children

This article argues that a range of child welfare interventions that sought to relocate children away from their birth families and home communities between the middle decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries drew on a common moral frame. These interventions – child migration schemes, assimilationist policies towards indigenous children, institutions of corrective confinement and the child protection movement – have typically been previously studied as isolated national or organisational phenomena. However, this article outlines a common moral frame to which they made reference structured around the figure of the redeemable child, vulnerable to the effects of polluted social environments, seen as needing to be re-located to new environments that would enable their civic, moral and spiritual redemption. This argument is situated within a discussion of the articulation of moral meanings as a social practice, which addresses both the central elements of this moral frame and the contexts in which it was articulated. This moral frame did not determine child-care practices within these schemes, but was one source of influence on them. In particular, the article examines the role of economic rationality in the management of these schemes, arguing that the sacralised status of the child within the family discussed in the work of Vivianna Zelizer was not extended to the children to whom these schemes were addressed. The article concludes by identifying key areas for future comparative study of these diverse schemes in relation to these shared moral meanings