Introduction: ‘Everyday health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950 – Hannah Froom, Tracey Loughran, Kate Mahoney, and Daisy Payling

Part I: Experiential expertise
Introduction – Hannah Froom and Tracey Loughran
1 Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex and the tensions of liberal sexpertise – Ben Mechen
2 ‘Two more calls, one in tears …’: emotion, labour, and ethics of care at the Calgary Birth Control Association, 1970-79 – Karissa Robyn Patton
3 Expertise and experience in the Greek feminist birth control movement, c. 1974-86 – Evangelia Chordaki
4 Migration, kinship, and ‘everyday theorising’: Black British women’s narratives of genetic diagnosis in the postwar National Health Service – Grace Redhead

Part II: Sites and spaces
Introduction – Tracey Loughran
5 Writing everyday life into law: the ‘household duties test’, disabled women, social security, and assumed normality – Gareth Millward
6 Friendship, mutual aid, and activism in British transfeminine spaces, 1968-85 – Fleur MacInnes
7 A private matter? The Brook Advisory Centre and young people’s everyday sexual and reproductive health in the 1960s-80s – Caroline Rusterholz
8 Queering the agony aunt: reusing and adapting a public engagement activity for different audiences – Daisy Payling

Part III: Mass media and networks of communication
Introduction – Daisy Payling and Tracey Loughran
9 ‘Thirty years behind England’? Framing ‘natural’ childbirth in postwar Canada – Whitney Wood
10 ‘I started a new life when I joined Gemma’: disability, community, and sexuality in Gemma newsletters, 1978-2000 – Beckie Rutherford
11 Talk shows and ‘tanorexia’: motherhood and ‘sunbed addiction’ on British television in the 1990s – Fabiola Creed
12 ‘Having been there … I know how hard it is’: relatability and ordinariness in twenty-first century British clean eating – Louise Morgan

Part IV: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity
Introduction – Kate Mahoney and Tracey Loughran
13 Girlhood menstrual management and the ‘culture of concealment’ in postwar Britain – Hannah Froom
14 Is sex good for you? Risk, reward, and responsibility for young women in the late 1980s – Rosie Gahnstrom, Lucy Robinson, and Rachel Thomson
15 ‘What your generation probably don’t understand is …’: exploring intergenerational dynamics in oral history – Kate Mahoney
16 Cultivating vulnerability: power and the emotional ethics of oral history practice beyond the interview – Tracey Loughran
17 … and breathe: style narratives at home March 2020-March 2021 – Carol Tulloch

‘Everyday Health’, embodiment, and selfhood since 1950 is a bold intervention in the social history of medicine, exploring the shaping of ‘everyday health’ in different contexts since 1950.
The volume centres the day-to-day health experiences of diverse individuals and groups, in contrast to histories that focus on states, medical professionals, and other experts. It illustrates how different aspects of identity affected experiences of health and wellbeing in the postwar era. Its emphasis on intersectionality extends existing social histories of health and contributes to wider discussions on the politics of identity. The volume foregrounds methodologies for writing bottom-up histories of health, subjectivity, and embodiment. Several chapters explore how historians research, write, and interact with different participants and audiences. This methodological focus ensures its relevance to scholars everywhere. In problematising the term ‘everyday health’, it contributes to debates on ‘expertise’ and ‘ordinariness’.
This exciting new volume establishes ‘everyday health’ as a lens through which to (re)examine the history of health and medicine.