What is “health,” and what does it mean to be “healthy”? In this issue, Breanne Fahs queries how we, along with the pharmaceutical industry, have come to redefine mental, emotional, and sexual health. Meanwhile, Helen Heightsman Gordon’s poem reflects on caretaking. Alex Jay Kimmelman reminds us that people once traveled to find healthier climates in [...]

When Josiah Gregg and a company headed southwest on the Santa Fe trail in 1831, the young man was confined to lie prone in the bed of a Dearborn wagon. He suffered from chronic dyspepsia and tuberculosis, and western travel was proscribed for his condition. This therapy proved to be highly successful. Two weeks into [...]

Political discourse surrounding healthcare reform has included purposeful disruptions of Congressional town hall meetings, the brandishing of firearms at opposition rallies, and the use of Nazi imagery to depict President Obama. Why has opposition to healthcare reform been so contentious? Conventional responses from the political right typically focus on ideological differences, such as varying views [...]

“Ask your doctor if medical advice from a television commercial is right for you.” —Bumper sticker slogan At a the annual conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality last year, I heard a researcher describe how the pharmaceutical industry “jukes the stats”—that is, crunches numbers creatively in order to persuade the public [...]

As an eighteen year old climbs up on top of a telephone box, a couple on their  Saturday errands  prepare to tell him to get down. By the time they have cantered over he is back on the ground, thanks to a reverse back-flip. This is greeted with applause from his friends and whitened knuckles [...]

The furniture was gone. And only the promise of empty space stared back at me. It was the promise of empty space that had beckoned me to Utah six and a half years earlier. The naked sky offered me the possibility to do anything and be anyone, and the silent mountain sentinels assented to shield [...]

A poem by Helen Heightsman Gordon.