Issue № 6 | March 2009

What is "health," and what does it mean to be "healthy"?

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 prescribed for his condition.

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.

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 that their products actually accomplish their stated tasks.

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.

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 me from mistakes.

A poem by Helen Heightsman Gordon.