The healthy device and the definition of health: The example of the National Programme for a Healthy Life

Abstract

The National Programme for a Healthy Life emerges from the creation of three other programmes that encourage the so-called healthy habits among individuals. Due to be implemented by the National Ministry of Health between 2007 and 2010, it is not a unique case in its group, as the National Programme for a Healthy Life presents the opportunity to think about the importance of health in modern society. In the modern context of a transition that migrates from medicine as curative medicine to a conception of medicine as a preventive science, and from the perspective of the concept of biopolitics, developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, it is inferred the existence of a healthy mechanism which organizes the discourses on health and builds truthful discourses about it. The presence of this mechanism could be a possible explanation of the omnipresence of health in modern society, the constant concern to prolong life and the instigation of self-control, care and improvement of an individual's health