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For many years, scientists within human and animal science have extensively studied the philosophy of medicine, but never have both sides communicated with each other on the concepts of health, quality of life and welfare. This book aims to help clarify the difficult but central notions of health and welfare by comparing the human and animal variants of these concepts. Split into three parts, this book starts by presenting a background of some of the major theories of human health and welfare, among these are bio-statistical theory, classical theories such as Aristotle and Bentham, as well as objectivist and subjectivist contemporary theories. This is followed by a detailed discussion of theories on animal welfare and health; these include coping, feeling and preference theories. The final part of the book tests a comprehensive conceptual framework of a holistic kind, which focuses on the individual's ability to achieve their vital goals. This book will be of significant interest to students, researchers and debaters of animal ethics and welfare.

This book is a scholarly treatise on the nature of health presented in the form of a dialogue between an inquirer and a philosopher. It attempts to do two things: first, to introduce modern philosophy of health to non-philosophers, in particular to people with a professional relation to health care; and second, to elaborate and specify in some detail the author's holistic theory of health. According to this theory, a person is completely healthy if, and only if, she or he is able to realize all her or his vital goals given reasonable circumstances. This theory is presented by the philosopher in the book, but it is at the same time scrutinized and criticized by the inquirer. Some of the criticisms presented, and to which the philosopher responds, have been put forward in published reviews of the author's earlier works. Towards the end of the book the author demonstrates how his philosophy of health can be applied to related areas, such as the theory of disability, and to modern ethical discussion, such as that concerning prioritization in health care. The book is supplemented with a list of definitions of central concepts and with an annotated bibliography

In this article I provide an analysis of some salient concepts of dignity. The text is a development of a work which was initiated in the year 2000 in the research programme Dignity and Older Europeans (DOE) supported by the European Union. The programme was both theoretical and empirical. The empirical part, which was the most comprehensive, consisted of focus-group interviews with health care and social care personnel, elderly persons within health care or social care, and representatives from the general public. The interviews concerned the care of the elderly and attitudes towards the elderly. Some questions concerned how the interviewees conceived the concept of dignity and what they meant by behaviour respectful of dignity in the care of the elderly. Altogether around 1000 focus-group interviews were conducted in seven of the countries involved. The theoretical part of the programme consisted of an analysis of the concepts of dignity based on studies of dictionary entries in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Slovakish, Polish and Swedish) as well as previous philosophical analyses of the concept. In the theoretical part of the study there emerged four different concepts of dignity: dignity of merit, dignity of moral standing, dignity of identity and human dignity. Characterizations of these concepts have been presented and developed in several publications, for example Nordenfelt (2004) and (2009). In the present article this analysis is taken a step further. I take as a starting point some previous studies, including Schroeder (2008), Sulmasy (2013) and my earlier ones, and propose an improvement and clarification of my earlier classification of dignities. At the same time I enlarge the analysis to concern worths in general and how these are attached to entities in general, not just human beings. The four kinds of dignities which I now propose are called: attributed dignity, dignity of inflorescence, dignity of identity and human dignity.

The basic work for this book was carried out during the spring of 1989 in Edinburgh, where I had been granted a research position at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I should like to express here my indebtedness to the Institute for the opportunity thus afforded me. I should also like to say how very grateful I am for the stimulating conversations I had there with Professor Timothy Sprigge and Dr. Elizabeth Telfer. Dr. Telfers's own treatise Happiness (1980) has been a major influence on my view of the questions involved. The basic view of health and illness presented in this book is more fully set out in my On the Nature of Health (1987). As in the case of my previous larger projects, I have received a great amount of support and may wise comments from Professor Ingmar Pörn, Helsinki. Three Danish experts – Anton Aggernaes, Erik Ostenfeld and Peter Sandøe – have made valuable comments. Professor Heng ten Have, Nijmegen, has improved my reading of the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. I should also like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Health and Society, University of Linköping, for helping me to avoid a number of the pitfalls that can so easily stumble into when it comes to a treatise like this. Especially I should like to mentioned Per-Erik Liss, Ingemar Nordin and Bo Petersson, all three of whom have read and commented on the entire manuscript. A Swedish version of this book, Livskvalitet och hälsa, came out in 1991. I have been made quite a number of corrections and additions, one type of addition being replies to critical points made in reviews of the Swedish version. I should like to thank Malcolm Forbes for valuable help putting my English into publishable condition. Linköping, May 1993 Lennart Noredenfelt

Background: It has often been shown that immigrants are particularly at risk for mental ill health. The aim of the study was to investigate the association of immigrant- and non-immigrant-specific factors with mental ill health within a diverse immigrant population.Method: An extensive questionnaire was sent out to a stratified random sample of three immigrant populations from Finland, Iraq and Iran. The 720 respondents completed a Swedish, Arabic or Farsi (Persian) version of the questionnaire including the WHO (10) Well-Being Index and the HSCL-25.Results: The results indicate that mental ill health among immigrants is independently associated with non-immigrant-specific factors (i.e. high number of types of traumatic episodes, divorced/widowed, poor social network, economic insecurity and being female) and immigrant-specific factors (i.e. low level of sociocultural adaptation). These results were obtained regardless of whether mental ill health was operationalized as low subjective well-being or a high symptom level of anxiety/depression.Conclusions: These fi ndings support the notion that mental ill health among immigrants is a multi-faceted phenomenon that needs to be tackled within a wide range of sectors — e.g. the healthcare system, the social service sector and, of course, the political arena.