THE QUESTION

This chapter deals with the entanglement of health and beauty. I discuss how concepts and states of “health” are entwined with concepts and states of “beauty”, and in particular what problems this creates for medical practice.

My analysis is grounded in a historical case study: Nazi medicine (Efstathiou 2012). I argue that Nazi medicine conflated notions of health with notions of beauty and pursued aesthetic standards using medical means. The political exception of Jews, among other civilian populations, was a means to realizing the vision of a “healthy German race”, where “health” was understood within a particular aesthetic ideological frame as equated to “purity” and “beauty”.

Nazi medicine may seem too extreme to be an example of anything but horror, but it exemplifies the consequences of conflating health and beauty, a common and indeed live issue, as well as several broader philosophical issues.

Our notions of health and beauty overlap; the ambiguity can prove profitable for some and injurious to others. Consider the covers of magazines devoted to “healthy living”: such publications present models of “health” that are rarely unattractive, seemingly implying that securing health is tantamount to a particular beautiful look. The popular media are not the only ones to identify health and beauty. Various conditions are classed as medical disorders purely for cosmetic reasons: for example, birthmarks, hair loss or common psoriasis. Conversely, descriptors of “health” often equivocate between saying that an organism is beautiful and healthy; for example, when we talk about an animal's “glossy coat” or “bright eyes”.