This work in progress is a chapter for a trade book titled Healthy Scepticism, which, in its main body, offers a set of case studies to explore contemporary lines of health doubts and critiques and traces them historically.

This chapter is one of two early, stage-setting chapters. It offers a background to our contentious moment in health debate and has three main aims (and a bunch of more peripheral ones):

1 to present the history of medical activism in the US and UK from the 1950s-1970s in a readable way that does not lose intellectual complexity.

2 to mark this moment as offering an important point of origin for health scepticism that follows (of useful and the decidedly un-useful varieties)

3 to use the explicit antagonisms set between medicine’s critics and its institutionalised form in this era as a way into the thorny questions about how we represent medicine (quite differently) in our contemporary and where these meanings come from and how they are made.