Representing health and illness: thoughts for the 21st century.

The on-going discussion about a new empiricism in the study of the medical humanities has lead to a misapprehension about the problems attendant to representing health and illness. The difficulty in understanding the politics of health and illness as well as the concomitant new aestheticism that has arisen concerning its representation demands a rethinking of these categories in the 21st century. Obesity can provide a model for the importance of this problem today.