The notion of public health differs from that of health per se insofar as it concerns not individuals but groups and populations. Thus, with the notion of public health, the main concern is the health of a collective of any nature. The focus is on the way in which groups exposed to health risks are identified, distinguished, and controlled, and more generally on the way in which societies are governed today. As Michel Foucault showed, we tend to think of government less as a direct relationship between a sovereign and individuals/subjects, than as the way of controlling and framing the relatively autonomous lives of a population; in other words, as a biopolitics.
