Skip main navigation

What is health?

What is health? Watch the development of a collective understanding of health, as defined by the World Health Organisation.

So far we have discussed how public health progressed through the centuries and predominantly aimed to tackle unhealthy conditions resulting in ill health or death.

In this video, we explore the development of, at the time, a new understanding of health, defined by the World Health Organisation (1948) as: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

This article is from the free online

Tackling Public Health Issues: Concepts and Evidence

Created by
FutureLearn - Learning For Life