Vulnerability, social inequality and health

Abstract

The use of the term vulnerability has become popular today, and is used in both common everyday discourse and more rigorously in scientific analysis. For historians this has brought about the risk of using the term anachronistically. Etymologically, the word vulnerable (emerging in France in the 1670s) evolved from the Latin vulnerabilis, thus from vulnerare, meaning 'wounded'. Reference to 'the vulnerable' therefore came to indicate persons who were prone to wounding or who were actually 'wounded' in physical and social terms. The idea of physical fragility - related to the incapacities of children, the elderly, the disabled or the ill - took over much of the connotation of the term, this essentially being coupled with their inability to work and to thus provide for one's personal and household livelihood. Besides the physical vulnerability of the human body, social fragility the product of social inequalities - came to identify specific social cohorts such as women ( especially single mothers and widows), marginalised groups (the orphans or the diseased), and whole communities (such as the Roma people).