The Rise of Health A Collocation Analysis of Conceptual Changes in News Discourse, 1950-2010

The emergence of key concepts in Reinhart Koselleck's sense has been much discussed in conceptual history, but mainly for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The article documents a post-World War II emergence of the concept of health, from relative anonymity to becoming a key concept, comparable to concepts such as politics, democracy, and culture. While previous research has emphasized conceptual mobility, this article focuses on conceptual aggregation, where the concept of health assembles and assimilates meanings, becoming essential to discourse. Th is is explained with reference to the development of the welfare state and the political use of a positive, expanded health concept. Th e article utilizes a collocation analysis of Norwegian digitized newspapers 1950-2010, culled from the uniquely extensive database of the Norwegian National Library.