Chronic Challenges:Picturing Chronic Disease by the World Health Organization

Chronic diseases are amongst the leading causes of mortality in the world, the subject of major regional and international efforts to tackle shared risk factors, implement prevention and control measures, and set national targets as part of the drive towards universal health coverage. Yet there is a growing conviction that chronic diseases suffer an image problem. It has been suggested that the terminology ‘dulls the senses to the urgency of the problems involved’, and in an age where the mass media affords unprecedented opportunities to inform and persuade people to care about their health and that of others, chronic disease representation remains a contested and much debated issue. This article investigates how the World Health Organization (WHO) created and disseminated visual narratives to raise popular consciousness and build a visual vocabulary around chronic disease in the second half of the twentieth century. It examines the measures taken to conceptualise, photograph and publicise chronic diseases, and considers who had control over their representation. In focussing predominantly on cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, it reveals different narratives; the power of scientific and technological progress; individual and community action for health; promising utopian and parallel dystopian visions. It embeds these in a production context which reveals an intricate picturing process involving overcoming challenges of representation. It uses this historical background to discuss issues relating to how chronic disease and chronic pain have been narrated visually, such as the ideas of emotional response, moral failure, how people navigate the ‘risk society’, and ultimately the concerns regarding the intentional and unintentional influence that the media can have on the image of disease given to society.