Why Health?: What We Need to Think About When We Think About Health

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 situa