AA.VV
O livro aborda, a diferentes níveis de desenvolvimento, as múltiplasconexões entre as desigualdades sociais, vulnerabilidade e saúde, emvários períodos históricos e áreas geográficas na Europa. The use ofthe term vulnerability has become popular today, and is used in bothcommon everyday discourse and more rigorously in scientific analysis.For historians this has brought about the risk of using the termanachronistically. Etymologically, the word vulnerable (emerging inFrance in the 1670s) evolved from the Latin vulnerabilis, thus fromvulnerare, meaning ‘wounded’. Reference to ‘the vulnerable’ thereforecame to indicate persons who were prone to wounding or who wereactually ‘wounded’ in physical and social terms. The idea of physicalfragility - related to the incapacities of children, the elderly, thedisabled or the ill - took over much of the connotation of the term,this essentially being coupled with their inability to work and tothus provide for one’s personal and household livelihood. Besides thephysical vulnerability of the human body, social fragility - theproduct of social inequalities - came to identify specific socialcohorts such as women (especially single mothers and widows),marginalised groups (the orphans or the diseased), and wholecommunities (such as the Roma people).
