A deeply reflective and urgently argued book that asks a deceptively simple question: why do we, as individuals and societies, pursue health–and what does that pursuit say about who we are?
The pandemic exposed challenges to our collective approach to health. Now, more than ever, it is important to connect with the core values that define public health and to do so in a way that is useful to those who are engaged both in thinking, and in practicing, in the field.
In Why Health?, Sandro Galea interrogates the assumptions that underlie contemporary health discourse. Informed by the success and failures of the pandemic moment, and drawing from philosophy, history and public health, he argues that health has become both a moral ideal and a social organizing principle—shaping policy, identity and our sense of purpose. Rather than accepting health as an unquestioned good, the book explores how our understanding of health reflects broader anxieties about control, meaning and progress. It situates today’s thinking about health within the larger human story: from early theological understandings of illness as divine judgment, to Enlightenment notions of the rational body, to modern health systems as engines of moral worth. In doing so, it invites readers to reconsider health not as an endpoint but as a mirror of social values-an evolving construct through which we negotiate our obligations to self and others.
Through essays that are at once analytical and humane, Why Health? challenges us to think beyond metrics and medicine, toward a richer understanding of what makes a good society. It offers a meditation on how health, rightly understood, can deepen rather than narrow our engagement with the world.
About the author
Sandro Galea is the Margaret C. Ryan Dean of the School of Public Health, the Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health, and Vice Provost of Interdisciplinary Initiatives WashU Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis.
Galea has been named an epidemiology innovator by Time, a top voice in healthcare by LinkedIn, and is one of the most cited social scientists in the world. His writing and work are featured regularly in national and global public media. He is the author of Well and The Contagion Next Time, among many other books. A native of Malta, he has served as a field physician for Doctors Without Borders and has held academic and leadership positions at Boston University, Columbia University, University of Michigan and the New York Academy of Medicine.