Health (and the) Humanities in Early America

This state-of-the-field essay reviews the work of up-and-coming scholars who write about health in early America and uses that work to consider what the future of health and the humanities might look like for early Americanists. The current critical energy around the subject of health is exciting but still too disciplinarily bound, especially given the irreducible interdisciplinarity of the topic. This essay begins by describing what early Americanists can offer health humanists and concludes by suggesting what early Americanists might learn from the disciplinary promiscuity of the health humanities.