Health is more than the absence of disease. It is shaped by how our bodies function, but also by where and how we live, the resources and opportunities available to us, our relationships with others, and the institutions that organize our lives.
It is also shaped by values and norms: our ideas about what is normal or abnormal, beautiful or ugly, clean or dirty, autonomous or dependent, responsible or irresponsible, deserving or undeserving.
For future physicians and other health professionals, this broader understanding of health matters because social conditions, values, norms, and relations of power shape clinical encounters: what is recognized as illness, whose suffering is taken seriously, what choices patients are actually able to make, and what counts as appropriate or good care.
Scientific and clinical knowledge are essential, but they cannot by themselves answer all of the questions that health professionals must confront.
Professional judgment requires more than knowing the correct diagnosis or treatment. It requires being able to recognize how a problem has been framed, what that frame reveals, what it leaves out, and how a better understanding of the problem can lead to a better response.
In HHV, health is biological and social, individual and collective, material and cultural—shaped by bodies and environments, choices and constraints, values and norms, institutions and power.
The result is not simply that students learn more about health. They learn to see more of what health is and what it can be.