by Sari Altschuler
about Sari Altschuler
Sari Altschuler is Associate Professor of English and the founding director of Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. She is the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and currently at work on a monograph about disability and citizenship in the early United States.
Introduction
Musing, in the first months of a new century, on what he called “Infectious History,” Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist Joshua Lederberg (2000, 290) predicted, “The future of humanity and microbes will likely unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be titled Our Wits versus Their Genes.” Lederberg was instrumental in defining the phenomenon that came to be known as “emerging infections.” The term referred to the proliferation of microbes that caused catastrophic communicable disease in humans. For Lederberg and his colleagues, the phenomenon was not an unknowable threat but a predictable effect of a kind of progress: an expanding global population was moving into areas that had been un- or sparsely inhabited by human beings—thus developing those spaces—while improvements in transportation and an increasingly global economy were moving goods and people rapidly around the world. As these microbes encountered a new species—humans, hence a new food source—they also found a new form of transportation, enabling them to hitchhike around the globe, perhaps mutating in the process. Humans are “major engineers of biological traffic,” warned Stephen Morse, Lederberg’s colleague, referring not only to literal transportation but also to the practices through which humans produce the ideal conditions for biological growth...
Humanities
The word humanities is at the core of the medical and health humanities. Still, anyone who has walked into a room of health-care practitioners, students, and humanities professors ready to do medical humanities or health humanities work knows all are eager to improve the practices of health care, but individuals differ—sometimes radically—in their understanding of what that work is. Today’s debates over defining the health humanities frequently focus on the differences between health and medicine (Crawford et al. 2010; T. Jones et al. 2017), but some of the most challenging differences emerge from divergent understandings of the word humanities. These differences are not merely inside baseball: they determine what kinds of interventions into the practices of health care are possible. In medical contexts especially, the term humanities names something missing from health care today: a way to cultivate humaneness. These humanities offer a sorely needed antidote to the callous dollars-and-cents logic and baroque bureaucracies of today’s Western health-care systems. As recently as 2014, the American Academy of Medical Colleges identified training in feeling and therapy for physicians, with an emphasis on empathy, as the core of humanities work in medical schools (Krisberg 2014). This understanding of the humanities is best...
About this Site
Keywords for Health Humanities provides a rich, interdisciplinary vocabulary for the burgeoning field of health humanities and, more broadly, for the study of medicine and health. Sixty-five entries by leading international scholars examine current practices, ideas, histories, and debates around health and illness, revealing the social, cultural, and political factors that structure health conditions and shape health outcomes.
Presenting possibilities for health justice and social change, this volume exposes readers—from curious beginners to cultural analysts, from medical students to health care practitioners of all fields—to lively debates about the complexities of health and illness and their ethical and political implications. A study of the vocabulary that comprises and shapes a broad understanding of health and the practices of healthcare, Keywords for Health Humanities guides readers toward ways to communicate accurately and effectively while engaging in creative analytical thinking about health and healthcare in an increasingly complex world—one in which seemingly straightforward beliefs and decisions about individual and communal health represent increasingly contested terrain.
Health
feature
Keywords
Now:
Pandemic
**For a limited time, read the introduction to [*Keywords for Health Humanities*](/health-humanities/introduction/)** In a press briefing on September 6, 2022, the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha [announced](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/09/06/press-briefing-by-white-house-covid-19-response-team-and-public-health-officials-88/), "This is a moment when people can keep themselves healthy and safe as they think about the road ahead." The same week the CDC, which [dramatically undercounts cases](https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/health/ba-5-hidden-covid-case-increase/index.html), [reported](https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#county-view?list_select_state=all_states&list_select_county=all_counties&data-type=Risk&null=Risk) COVID transmission was at its highest level in 85% of all counties in the US; in other words, many, many people were sick. By "healthy," then, Jha meant only not hospitalized [immediately](https://www.wbur.org/news/2022/01/21/massachusetts-primary-incidental-coronavirus-grouping) from COVID. In our introduction to *Keywords for Health Humanities*, Priscilla Wald, Jonathan Metzl, and I described *health*, the noun, as a promiscuous term: "a broad description of proper functioning...an intimate term we use to understand our minds and bodies...a wide-ranging cultural imperative...a moral judgment...a word used to describe a set of professions, and...a central element of all life." One reason *health* drew our attention for the volume is because of the broad global agreement achieved in the late 1940s that *health* is "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" ([WHO, 1946](https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution)) and "a fundamental human right" ([UN, 1948](https://www.un.org/en/about-us/udhr/foundation-of-international-human-rights-law))....