People prefer health over illness.
- It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver. [attributed to Mahatma Gandhi]
- Health is not valued till sickness comes. [attributed to Thomas Fuller]
- You’re in pretty good shape for the shape you are in. [Dr. Seuss]
Health is what allows living organisms to function and enjoy life. It is not amenable to analysis along the domains of Being. Not-unpleasant sensations may accompany it but it is not a sensation. It is not a thought, an emotion or an action, though our thoughts, emotions and actions can promote or demote good health; and some thoughts, emotions and actions are unhealthy. We can be healthy without experiencing much pleasure and without being happy. We can be healthy and still die young, such as from an accident. Health is not an abstraction or an experience of the brain alone. It is a measurable physical reality, which we might call a predicate desire, in distinction from our other basic and core desires.
Entire disciplines of medicine are devoted to aspects of health, including cardiology, neurology, psychiatry, nephrology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, urology, immunology, endocrinology, oncology, the broad field of internal medicine, and many others. Industries have developed around physical fitness and mental health. You could spend your life in the study and practice of any one of these fields, as our doctors do, but little explanation is necessary to make the point that good health is an essential preference.
Real
True Narratives
Book narratives on the effects of public issues on health:
- Catherine Coleman Flowers, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret (The New Press, 2020): “ Rush’s home had no septic system. It would have cost at least $15,000, a price she couldn’t afford. Moving wasn’t an option . . .”
- Linda Villarosa, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on the Lives and On the Health of Our Nation (Doubleday, 2022): “How this country understands birth, personhood and privacy — why its laws even presume to dictate what happens during an individual pregnancy — is deeply rooted in slavery. A couple of hundred years ago, the reproductive health of enslaved Black people literally decided the state of this country’s economy . . .”
On dealing with illness:
- Tessa Miller, What Doesn’t Kill You: A Life With Chronic Illness – Lessons From a Body in Revolt (Holt, 2021): about getting good medical care for IBS.
- Fred D’Aguiar, Year of Plagues: A Memoir of 2020 (Harper, 2021), about the author’s aggressive prostate cancer: “D’Aguiar teaches, he writes, that gender is fluid. And yet he’s not at all pleased when, thanks to testosterone blockers, his testes shrink and his breasts begin to grow.”
- Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir (e-book, 2021), about living with spinal muscular atrophy: “. . . his rage to live shivers in every sentence.”
- James Tate Hill, Blind Man’s Bluff: A Memoir (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021), about being declared legally blind at age 16: “. . . the book is largely about Hill’s attempts to pass as a sighted person.”
- Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery (Convergent Books, 2021): “Douthat sees symbols everywhere; he is telling a story not only of his own illness, but also about the stories we tell ourselves, secular and religious, to make sense of illness.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
On health care and health care systems:
- Irene Papanicolas & Peter Smith, eds., Health System Performance Comparison: An Agenda For Policy, Information And Research (Open University Press, 2013).
- Leiyu Shi & Douglas A. Singh, Delivering Health Care in America: A Systems Approach (Jones & Bartlett Learning, 8th edition, 2021).
- Raisa Deber, Treating Health Care: How the Canadian System Works and How It Could Work Better (University of Toronto Press, 2018).
- Jon Magnussen, Karsten Vrangbaek & Richard Saltman, Nordic Health Care Systems: Recent Reforms and Current Policy Challenges (Open University Press, 2009).
- Paul V. Dutton, Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France (Cornell University Press, 2007).
- Jessica Scott Jerome, A Right to Health: Medicine, Marginality, and Health Care Reform in Northeastern Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2015).
- David S. Dalton & Douglas J. Weatherford, eds., Healthcare in Latin America: History, Society, Culture (University of Florida Press, 2022).
- K. Sujatha Rao, Do We Care?: India's Health System (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- Margaret M. Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience (University of California Press, 1980).
- Takakazu Yamagishi, Health Insurance Politics in Japan: Policy Development, Government, and the Japan Medical Association (ILR Press, 2022).
- Paul U.U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (University of California Press, 1985).
- Elizabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back (Penguin Press, 2017): “As Rosenthal describes American health care, it’s not really a market; it’s more like a protection racket — tolerated only because so many different institutions are chipping in to cover the extortionary bill and because, ultimately, it’s our lives that are on the line.”
- Beatrix Hoffman, Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
- Donald A. Barr, Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and the Social Determinants of Health (Johns Hopkins University Press, 3rd edition, 2019).
- Norman Daniels, Just Health Care (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
- Daniel E. Hough, Irrationality in Health Care: What Behavioral Economics Reveals About What We Do and Why (Stanford University Press, 2013).
- Danielle T. Raudenbush, Health Care Off the Books: Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America (University of California Press, 2020).
Leading textbooks in a few of the more than 150 medical specialties and subspecialties:
- Joseph Loscalzo, et. al., eds., Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine (McGraw Hill / Medical, 21st edition, 2022).
- Lee Goldman, et. al., Goldman-Cecil Medicine (Elsevier, 27th edition, 2023).
- Elan D. Louis, et. al., Merritt’s Neurology (Wolters Kluwer, 14th edition, 2022).
- Vincent T. DeVita, Jr., M.D., et. al., DeVita, Hellman, and Rosenberg's Cancer: Principles & Practice of Oncology (Wolters Kluwer, 12th edition, 2023).
- Peter Libby, et. al., Braunwalds Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine (Elsevier, 12th edition, 2022).
- Gary S. Firestein, et. al., eds., Firestein & Kelley’s Textbook of Rheumatology (Elsevier, 12th edition, 2024).
- John F. Salmon, Kanski's Clinical Ophthalmology: A Systematic Approach (Elsevier, 10th edition, 2025).
- Elizabeth H. Holt, et. al., Greenspan’s Basic Medical Endocrinology (Elsevier, 5th edition, 2022).
- Mark Feldman, et. al., Sleisenger and Fordtran’s Gastrointestinal and Liver Disease: Pathophysiology / Diagnosis / Management (Elsevier, 11th edition, 2022).
- Jack W. McAninch, Smith and Tanagho's General Urology (McGraw Hill / Medical, 19th edition, 2020).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
From the dark side:
- Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers: A Novel (Viking, 2018), “is a page turner about illness and mortality.”
- Lakiesha Carr, An Autobiography of Skin: A Novel (Pantheon, 2023), tells “the stories of three contemporary Black women, each struggling with different manifestations of trauma that finds its primary expression through their experience of their own physicality.”
Poetry
From the dark side:
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Zenas Witt”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Health is not easily expressed in music. Steven Halpern has created two albums, “Radiant Health & Well-Being” (1993) (56’), and “Optimal Health” (2017) (79’) – soothing albums focused on inner health, or well-being. Other offerings are “Meditation Music for Optimal Health” (2018) (135’), from Tibetan Singing Bowls Meditation; and “Optimal Health and Self Care” (2017) (118’), from Heart Chakra Association.
