The South African disease: apartheid health and health services
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Southern African Research Services (SARS)
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Disease, its prevention and cure, are regarded as 'scientific' and technical problems. This book sets out an entirely different perspective: one in which all the major illnesses of our time are seen as social. This means that who gets sick and why they get sick can best be explained by examining the society in which they live. In examining aspects of disease in South Africa, this book is as much about apartheid, the (previously) dominant social reality in South Africa, as it is about th disease. It is also a book about health services. As with illness, these services are branded with the stamp of society in which they exist. They cannot simply be understood simply as an institutional response to disease: they have been shaped by the apartheid state to the same extent as "Bantu Education" or the practice of housing people in separate "group areas".