Harvard University Press Blog

Q&A with Sharon Strocchia, author of Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy

As part of Women’s History Month, we spoke with Sharon T. Strocchia about her new book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.

Your research demonstrates that women in Renaissance Italy played a major role in providing health care. Why have historians failed to recognize their centrality until so recently?

I would highlight two reasons why Renaissance women healers have been hiding in plain sight for so long. First, the historiography of Italian Renaissance medicine has been dominated by developments in academic medicine—anatomy, dissection, humanistic debates. Although this body of scholarship has been invaluable for understanding transformations in medical thinking, it has been less concerned with the lived experience of illness on the streets or the activities of frontline healers in households and hospitals. As a result, studies of women’s entanglements with household medicine, care practices, and the culture of experimentation on the Italian peninsula have not flourished to the same degree as elsewhere. Second, many of the care practices performed by Renaissance women have either been naturalized as “women’s work” or coded as charitable activities. The first interpretation makes women’s labor and know-how less visible, while the second often empties it of medical meaning. In addition, a persistent focus on practitioners’ official titles and occupational identities, along with the greater value assigned to cure over care, have led scholars to both undercount and undervalue the healthcare services women provided to household and community. In order to capture a more accurate, dynamic picture of medical provisioning in the early modern period, we need to redefine what “counts” as medical work.  

What was one of the most surprising discoveries you made while conducting archival research for this book?

I was amazed by the extent to which sixteenth-century Italian urban women kept abreast of market trends and new technologies for making remedies and wellness products. Religious women living in convents, for instance, kept their finger on the pulse of commercial life, in part because selling medicinal remedies represented such a vital revenue stream for their communities. Thanks to their wide-ranging information networks, they could respond nimbly to shifts in the medical marketplace, such as the globalization of new medicaments and changing consumer preferences. They also stayed connected to the knowledge circulating in local health markets by exchanging treasured recipes with friends and family and by experimenting directly with various health-giving products.

You focus on the various spaces where women practiced medicine—the household, the pox hospital, and the convent. Can you give an example of how nun apothecaries worked “at the nexus of religion, magic, and medicine”? How did they understand their work to be both sacred and scientific?

Take the case of the Tuscan nun Orsola Fontebuoni, who was active in the 1620s. This recognized charismatic seamlessly melded her spiritual gifts with naturalistic healing skills. An accomplished pharmacist, Orsola was conversant with old standbys from medieval Mediterranean pharmacopeia as well as newer additions to the European medicine chest imported from the Americas. She helped expand the convent’s pharmacy business while also attracting powerful patrons, thanks to her visions and ecstasies. Even while she was experimenting with new remedies in her workshop, she trafficked in healing relics, circulating them within local female networks that included members of the Medici court. Among her most intimate clients was the Tuscan grand duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, to whom she provided magico-religious remedies like amulets, informed medical advice gleaned from long years of experience, and priceless consolation in the form of healing eloquence. For Orsola, these healing activities comprised an integrated whole that simultaneously tapped the powers of the natural and sacred worlds.

Your book moves between the micro and the macro in terms of historical scope, zeroing in on the lives of individual women and health practitioners to analyze the broader systems of their time. Who do you find to be one of the most fascinating figures in the book, and what do you think readers would want to know about her?

One of the most intriguing figures I encountered was the Florentine nun Giovanna Ginori. She came from a renowned local family that had deep investments in civic politics and social welfare initiatives. Giovanna entered the convent around age twelve and took vows four years later in 1517. Many of her female relatives were known for their charitable work, such as founding shelters for at-risk girls. So there was a shared family interest in helping the helpless, which probably accounts for Giovanna’s placement in the convent pharmacy at an early age. She apprenticed there for six years with an older, skilled mentor, from whom she learned her craft—how to identify and process medicinal herbs, how to prepare efficacious remedies, how to experiment with new techniques and materials. In the thirty-seven years that she ran the convent pharmacy, Giovanna also read widely in the medical literature of her day and experimented with new medical remedies in her workshop. Often working around the clock as a back-up nurse in the convent infirmary, she became a renowned pharmacist and healer. At the same time, she had a keen business sense that led her to develop innovative products, expand the pharmacy’s client base, and build its reputation. We still have several signed sales receipts written in her own hand. Gifted with skilled hands and an inquiring mind, Giovanna Ginori is proof positive that women have enjoyed a long history in medicine, science, and technology.   

We tend to focus on how far medicine has come since the 1500s, but what are some of the enduring effects or lessons of Renaissance medicine? How might we turn to the Renaissance to think about developing a culture of care and consolation?

I think there are a couple of things we can learn from these forgotten healers and their world. One is that the task of healing is complex. Renaissance medicine took a holistic view of health that wove together physical, mental, and spiritual or emotional elements. By contrast, modern biomedicine tends to divide the body into many constituent parts and to divorce human health from the broad ecosystems in which it is embedded. Renaissance notions of health and healing remind us that we’re deeply interconnected, both as individuals and as a species. I would also say that, while Renaissance medicine lacked the hallmarks associated with modern biomedicine, it was much richer in community-based resources. The importance of cultivating personal relationships with our healthcare providers as well as the crucial role played by support networks in sustaining health and well-being are lessons we’re learning over and over again.

From Latin Fragments to Greek Medicine

New year, new Loebs! Below, Loeb Classical Library General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the latest additions to what critic Adam Kirsch calls “one of the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship.”

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This season brings another exciting set of volumes for the Loeb Classical Library. A two-volume edition of Quintus Ennius (fl. ca. 204–169), the “father of Latin literature,” by Sander M. Goldberg and Gesine Manuwald (LCL 294, 537) inaugurates Fragmentary Republican Latin (FRL), a monumental new series in twelve volumes (as currently projected) that is the first Loeb Classical Library project with its own series editor (Manuwald) and one that will surely be an even more indispensable resource for all readers of Roman literature than its predecessor, Eric H. Warmington’s Remains of Old Latin (ROL) in four volumes. On the Greek side, the Library adds three new works by Galen to its growing collection of the great physician’s fundamental texts: Hygiene, Thrasybulus, and On Exercise with a Small Ball (LCL 535, 536). Meanwhile, John Yardley’s new edition of the third and fourth decades of Livy’s History of Rome proceeds apace with volume X, containing books 35–37 (LCL 301).

Remains of Old Latin (1935–40) was an outstanding achievement, masterfully collecting and organizing a broad range of material, making much of it available in a modern language for the first time, and supplying annotation at once concise and rich. ROL was nevertheless atypical of its era for featuring fragmentary texts, however important their authors. After all, the concept of scattered quotations from or paraphrases of texts subsequently lost as “fragments,” and an interest in collecting and organizing them, date only from the early modern period, especially the 19th century. Until fairly recently, fragments resided in forbiddingly specialized editions and were rarely encountered outside of footnotes, much less in translation. But that is changing, as many recent Loeb Classical Library editions illustrate, not least the landmark Early Greek Philosophy published last fall in nine volumes (LCL 524–532). The decision to replace Warmington’s venerable ROL recognized the need for substantial revision and rearrangement of the existing material; the inclusion of additional authors and genres; and the incorporation of current methodological awareness of the complex nature of fragments, their transmitting contexts, and the limitations they present for analyzing and appreciating the works of which they were once a part.

Much as Early Greek Philosophy abandoned the traditional but misleading title “Presocratics,” the new title Fragmentary Republican Latin not only avoids the unappetizing connotations of “remains” and “old,” but also reflects a much larger scope and ambition: FRL includes not only all verbatim citations of the respective authors and literary genres but also paraphrases and indirect comments, as well as the testimonia on lives and individual works. Projected to be included along with Ennius are Pacuvius and Accius as well as the tragic incerta; Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Caecilius Statius as well as the comic and dramatic incerta; the togata, Atellana, and mime; Lucilius and other political invective and popular verse; most testimonia and fragments from Roman Republican orators; most testimonia and fragments from Roman Republican historians; a selection of lyric, elegiac, and hexameter poetry; and selected inscriptions, including the Twelve Tables. Fragmentary works by authors of whom complete pieces are also extant will not be part of this collection; thus fragments of Varro, Cato, and of course Cicero will be added to the editions of their surviving works. FRL volumes will appear successively over the next few years.

The Shape of Things to Come

We’re going to be talking about 2016 for a long, long time. Like, forever. But time doesn’t stop, and history doesn’t end, and 2017’s already got a look about it. Here, then, is a slate of new and recent books fit for the shape of things to come.

In Democracy: A Case Study historian David Moss demonstrates that American democracy has survived and thrived from one generation to the next on the basis not principally of harmony but of conflict—sometimes intense conflict—mediated by shared ideals and a common faith in the nation’s system of democratic self-governance. For Moss, the important question is never whether there is tension in our politics, but rather whether that tension is constructive or destructive. But if those shared ideals erode and that common faith starts to go? Buckle up.

Speaking of Russia, Gregory Carleton lays bare how war is the unifying thread of their national epic. Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but in Russia: The Story of War Carleton shows how Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe or Christianity or civilization itself, often at immense cost.

From the story of Russia to the notion of the “Muslim World,” the longstanding misconception that 1.5 billion Muslims constitute a single religio-political entity. As Cemil Aydin asks in The Idea of the Muslim World, how did such a mistaken belief arise, why is it so widespread, and how can its grip be loosened so that a more fruitful discussion about politics in Muslim societies can begin?

Misconceptions make the world go round, though, and that of the “Muslim World” has helped make the West go right. For that we’ve got Far-Right Politics in Europe, a critical look at the far right throughout Europe that reveals a prehistory and politics more complex than stereotypes suggest and warns of the challenges posed to the EU’s liberal-democratic order. Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg make clear that these movements are determined to gain power through legitimate electoral means, and that they are succeeding.

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies, but nationalism and anti-immigrant fervor are big in the mix. The movement of peoples rouses passions, but many are actually very confused about how to feel about immigration—they are sympathetic to individual immigrants and their reasons for wanting to migrate, but concerned about the overall impact that immigration is having on their society. In Strangers in Our Midst, political theorist David Miller seeks to balance the rights of immigrants with the legitimate concerns of citizens, and defends the right of democratic states to control their borders and decide upon the future size, shape, and cultural make-up of their populations. But those rights don’t mean that just any border regime is fair or acceptable, so Miller also explains what is owed to different categories of immigrant, and what their responsibilities are once admitted.

Debates over immigration are of course often tied to squabbling over the proper role of the state in providing for those within its borders. The increasingly familiar idea of an unconditional basic income is meant to alleviate the pressures mounting on the traditional welfare state, and two world authorities outline the concept in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. With trials underway or in the works in Finland, Canada, the Netherlands, France, and even Oakland, basic income seems like an idea whose time has finally come.

Part of the argument for basic income is that it could help to alleviate the economic inequality that characterizes our nations and our world. A couple of years back, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century helped to thrust income inequality into public debate, and now a new volume, After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality, is coming to both kick the tires on Piketty’s argument and help steer us towards means of addressing the seemingly intractable problems that he highlights. Edited by Heather Boushey, Brad DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, the book includes work from Paul Krugman, Robert Solow, Branko Milanovic, Emmanuel Saez, and others, along with a substantial new contribution from Piketty himself.

Here in the U.S., every day brings news of how radically president-elect Trump may shift the nation’s course. Healthcare reform has of course been a pillar of his platform, which makes Miriam Laugesen’s Fixing Medical Prices ever more relevant. Fees charged by physicians in the U.S. are the most expensive in the world, and Laugesen uses the book to introduce readers to a largely unknown group called the Relative Value Scale Update Committee, whose periodic advisory recommendations to Medicare set off chain reactions across the entire health care system. Why would a hugely powerful group carry a name so plain? Because if you’re an interest group stealthily controlling American healthcare policy you’ve every interest in bureaucratic cover.

A few more books for Trump’s America: Sam Abrams’s Education and the Commercial Mindset is a careful study of the benefits and limits of applying market solutions to improving education, a cause to which incoming education secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her life. Carol Sanger’s About Abortion explores the emotional cost and social consequences of terminating pregnancy in the United States, a subject about which there’s loud and contentious public argument but great silence at more intimate levels; the book connects abortion secrecy to the distorted political conversation that results in this flood of state laws attempting to limit abortion access by increasingly bolder means. Lisa Goff’s Shantytown, USA was written as a history but may yet become a travel guide. And Yascha Mounk’s The Age of Responsibility, which shows how the notion of personal responsibility has become central to our moral vocabulary, political rhetoric, and public policies, aims us towards a more equitable future by forcing us to rethink our mutual responsibilities as citizens.

A lot to think about, a lot to read, and much more to come. Be excellent to each other.

Vermont’s Healing Spaces

In Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, Dr. Esther Sternberg brought neuroscience, immunology, and architecture together to look closely at how one’s immediate physical surroundings can affect mood, the immune system, neural functioning, and general health. Drawing equally on the history of medicine and on emerging knowledge, Sternberg sought to demonstrate the complex relationships between health and environment. The findings presented in the book have broad application, but the central concern for healing made hospitals and other healthcare institutions the main focus of the book’s prescriptions.

And now comes word that the hospitals of Vermont have taken a step towards filling them. Inspired by Healing Spaces, the Susan Sebastian Foundation has completed the multi-year project of installing original works of art in each of the state’s roughly 400 inpatient hospital rooms. Sternberg, who didn’t learn of the project until it was near completion, confessed feeling deeply moved by the story. “When you write a book,” she said, “you never know the impact it will have, and to see my words made into reality on this scale is tremendously fulfilling.”

Tremendously fulfilling, indeed.

Human Rights and Sustainable Development

From September 25th through 27th, world leaders gathered at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York to finalize and adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a platform tasked with “transforming our world” to “free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet” by 2030. To the editors of and contributors to the Health and Human Rights journal (HHR), the SDGs offered opportunities to reinforce international legal human rights obligations in an effort to promote equity and equality. As drafted, the SDGs missed those opportunities, failing to incorporate a consistent or integrated rights-based approach.

In a month-long series of posts, HHR contributors explored what the SDGs might mean for health and human rights. In the culminating summary below, reposted from the HHR blog, Executive Editor Carmel Williams and public health physician Alison Blaiklock offer a synthesis of the series, and highlight the continued need to prioritize human rights in the implementation and monitoring of the SDGs.

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Last weekend at the UN General Assembly, world leaders adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their 169 targets with much celebration. It had taken three years of political negotiation, public consultation, and enormous diplomacy to agree on the goals.

Contributors to our SDG SERIES welcome the SDGs as providing valuable opportunities to advance human dignity and rights. But their analyses of the SDGs also highlight missed opportunities, and signal the need for ongoing vigilance to keep human rights central to global development.

The SDGs were developed out of a far more participatory and global process than the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and now have a broader coverage of topics and targets. For example, the importance of peace to human development is explicitly recognised. The influence of human rights advocates can be seen in the acknowledgement of rights throughout the text of “Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” (2030 Agenda).

Human rights could have provided an integrating framework to the SDGs. Instead, as most contributors to the SDG SERIES note with disappointment, there is no cohesive approach, let alone a consistent rights-based approach, to the goals and targets.

The Political Economy of Thalidomide

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, who became famous for withholding Food and Drug Administration approval for Thalidomide in the early 1960s, died last week at 101. Notice of her death has been accompanied by retellings of the FDA’s early days, and of Kelsey’s heroic stand against the morning sickness drug later linked to terrible birth defects in other parts of the world. Rather than merely a story of one dogged researcher’s triumph, though, sociologist Monica Prasad sees the Thalidomide case as clear evidence against the notion of a laissez-faire United States government. Indeed, in The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty, excerpted below, Prasad offers the episode as an entry point for considering the weak U.S. welfare state as the product not of an unbridled free market but of a unique and remarkable system of American regulatory institutions.

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Doctors began to notice the first cases of the strange disease in 1959. Thousands of babies with stunted limbs and other severe birth defects were being born all over Germany, Britain, Sweden, Australia, dozens of countries. Many died from their deformities at birth. Others would experience difficulties as they grew, including heart disease and spina bifida. Through 1960 and into 1961, all around the world, the number of cases mounted.

In 1961 two doctors traced the problems to a sedative called Contergan that had been developed in Germany and marketed worldwide under other names. Contergan was prescribed for insomnia and for nausea. It did not seem to have side effects and was not toxic in overdose, and it became so popular that it was called “West Germany’s baby sitter.” But as the incidents rose, pediatricians began to suspect and then to document an extremely strong association between the birth defects and Contergan taken in the first trimester of pregnancy. It was withdrawn from the market in 1961, and eventually conclusive evidence emerged of how the drug caused the malformations. By then it had already affected over 10,000 children in “one of the greatest medical disasters of modern times.”¹

Amid the calamity, a stunning and justly celebrated act of resistance came to light: under the name Thalidomide, the drug had been kept off the American market by Frances Kelsey, a researcher at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with a hunch and a streak of self-confidence that led her to delay approval again and again, until the truth was finally known. Kelsey was well prepared for the task. She had done her graduate work in pharmacology at the University of Chicago (she was admitted on the assumption that “Frances” was a male name) in the lab that had identified the toxicity of an over-the-counter drug that had killed 107 people in 1937. The lab’s work led to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. During the war, Kelsey’s work on pregnant rabbits had shown her that drugs can cross the placental barrier and that pregnancy can change the body’s response to a drug.

Embryos and the Diverging Meanings of Life

In Embryos under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life, biologist Jane Maienschein gives us a thoughtful and historically contextualized look at embryos so as to better inform conversations that are too often clouded by politics. Scientific knowledge can and should affect our policy and social decisions, she argues, even when the science alone does not tell us what those decisions should be. In the conversation below, Maienschein outlines some of what we now know of embyros, and stresses the importance of allowing that knowledge to supplant conflicting assumptions about the workings and meanings of life.

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Q. Since before Aristotle cut open a developing chicken’s egg, scientists and theologians have theorized about embryos they couldn’t see. How does speculation about “invisible embryos” continue to shape contemporary thinking?

Most people have never seen an actual embryo, nor seen one develop from a fertilized egg cell. For them, embryos are largely “invisible” and imagined. Many people imagine a tiny person somehow there inside a woman who has just gotten pregnant, for example, and they imagine it as just growing larger over time. Yet in humans, the fertilized egg becomes an embryo and is called that until it is 8 weeks old; an embryo is not yet formed as a fully formed individual. Only after 8 weeks is it called a fetus, because it has the basic structure, the most important organs, and the very beginnings of the functioning of the human organism. Without knowing these developmental stages, and without actually seeing—through models or under a microscope—we are left to imagine what the invisible embryo looks like and how it behaves.

Q. What do the major advances in embryology over the course of the 20th century suggest about the trajectory of future science?

The case of embryo research shows how science is surprising and exciting in so many ways. Old assumptions give way to new knowledge, which leads to new insights and discoveries. The path is not always linear, and sometimes researchers get stuck in a way of thinking that takes a while to rethink. For example, most 20th-century researchers thought that once a cell becomes differentiated in a certain way, it will be fixed or determined in that way forever. We have learned that it is not that simple and that de-differentiation and re-differentiation is possible—with great potential for regenerative medicine. What history shows is the importance of becoming aware of underlying assumptions and rethinking them.

Childhood Obesity Isn't History Yet

In Childhood Obesity in America: Biography of an Epidemic, medical historian Laura Dawes helps us to see the cultural dimensions of what’s more commonly considered as a matter of health. By drawing on archival sources, published scientific papers, government reports, court case records, cultural ephemera, and interview material, she presents the changing answers to critical questions about childhood obesity from late 19th century America to our time. When a recent study found a surprising drop in the childhood obesity rate over the past decade, we asked Dawes to situate this welcome development within the history of concern over the size of our children.

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In 1963, doctors and nurses from the National Centre for Health Statistics set out around the country in specially fitted out Winnebagoes. They were going to take a tape measure to American children’s health. That study—the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey—is still going today. The survey shows that childhood obesity has steadily risen, more than tripling in the fifty years since those doctors in the 1960s first hit the road with rulers and scales. The increases were even bigger in African American and Hispanic children. But late last month researchers from the Centre and from the Public Health Service reported a new development: for the first time since the study began, rates of obesity had dropped in 2- to 5-year-olds. In young children, obesity is still more common than it was back in the 1960s, but is about 40% lower than its peak in the early 2000s. In older children, the inexorable rise over the past fifty years seems to have plateaued and hovers at around 17%. This is cause for cautious—very cautious—optimism.

It has been true for a long time that American kids are big, and have been getting bigger. In 1877, a Boston physician named Henry Bowditch carried out the first significant study of American children’s heights and weights. He had teachers in Boston schools measure their pupils’ heights and weights. With no calculators or computers in the nineteenth century, Bowditch got Beantown’s accountants to crunch the numbers. Even then, American children were larger—taller and especially heavier—than children in Europe. At a time when undernourishment was the major childhood nutritional problem, the fact that American children were big was something to be proud of. Bowditch didn’t consider that there could be “too big.” Tall and heavy, American children were strapping specimens compared with their spindly European peers. The American way of life with its opportunities, its egalitarianism, its freedoms, was being written onto children’s bodies.

Human Rights in Patient Care

Health and Human Rights—an open access online journal of which we assumed publication this year—posted a new issue this week at www.hhrjournal.org/

In addition to a selection of general papers addressing a range of global health concerns from a right to health perspective, the issue includes a themed section on Human Rights in Patient Care, co-edited by the Open Society Foundations. Below, we’ve posted the full text of the issue’s Introduction, written by guest editor Tamar Ezer, the Senior Program Officer at the Law and Health Initiative of the Public Health Program at the Open Society Foundations. We join HHR in encouraging readers to share and discuss this new issue and its important articles, and in welcoming new submissions and involvement with the journal’s blog.

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William, a paralegal living with HIV in Gayaza, Uganda, talks with a woman whose in-laws have threatened to take her property because she has HIV.
photo by Sven Torfinn

A man with mental disabilities is locked up in a mental health facility, forcibly medicated, and held in unhygienic conditions.

Hospital staff publicly disclose a patient’s HIV status.

A drug user is denied anesthesia during a medical operation.

The doctor at a health care facility refuses to treat a sex worker, throwing her out with a gaping wound.

Women living with HIV, Roma women, women with disabilities, and transgender persons are sterilized without their consent.

Unfortunately, these abuses of patients are not uncommon. At the same time, health care providers may also face rights violations themselves, such as unsafe working conditions or government sanctions for providing evidence-based care.

This issue of Health and Human Rights has a themed section on these concerns. The articles explore various facets of “human rights in patient care,” or the application of human rights principles to the context of patient care. The first piece, which Jonathan Cohen and I co-authored, lays out the human rights in patient care framework. It provides a typology of critical human rights applicable to patients and providers and differentiates the concept of human rights in patient care from other paradigms commonly applied to health care settings, such as the right to health (which overlaps with human rights in patient care in certain ways), patients’ rights, patient safety, and bioethics.

Health and Human Rights: Call for Submissions

With the submission window for its June 2014 Climate Justice issue recently closed, Health and Human Rights, the peer-reviewed open access journal of which we assumed publication this year, seeks papers for its December 2014 special issue on Health Rights Litigation. The journal, edited by Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, intends the issue to disseminate findings related to the Health Rights Litigation course sponsored by the Global School on the Enforcement of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the Global School):

For this special issue, Health and Human Rights welcomes articles that explore issues related to health rights litigation. We are particularly interested in receiving articles from Global School Health Rights Litigation course participants that examine health rights litigation in view of the various topics explored in the course, including reproductive and sexual health; health rights issues arising in health care settings, abuses in institutional settings, palliative care; access to medicines and approaches to health care rationing; structuring remedies to facilitate democratic deliberation and broad participation; strategies with respect to implementation of collective and structural judgments; and factors to consider in assessing the equity impacts of judgments, which include but go beyond income, gender and marginalized status and have left people with inadequate information to promote their own health rights, and undermined their power and means to manage risks to their health; and have left unchallenged gross inequities in the distribution of resources for health, including a lack of attention to vulnerable groups.

While issues of the journal frequently focus on special topics, each also includes a section of general health and human rights papers, some of which become available prior to issue publication, expediting access to new research. Authors may submit such work at any time; the journal’s general call for papers is as follows:

Original articles (research, commentary, and analysis) suitable for scholarly peer review are invited (3,500–7,000 words). In addition to research papers, we seek manuscripts that emerge from and reflect on practical efforts for the realization of social and economic rights (up to 7,000 words). The form and style of these pieces is flexible, but they should be of genuine relevance to people engaged in related work. Like all other submissions, papers for this section will be peer reviewed.

Health and Human Rights welcomes articles that explore the centrality of the right to health in all social, economic, cultural, and environmental contexts. We are interested particularly in the themes of (1) climate change and the right to health; (2) health rights and effectiveness of international treaty law; (3) interdisciplinary explorations of health and human rights; (4) rights-informed innovations in health program design; (5) health and human rights as “well-being.” Topics might include (but are not limited to): women’s health, maternal mortality, refugees and other vulnerable populations, asylum, children and adolescents at risk, current conflicts in civil disturbances, environmental concerns, global health delivery, sustainable development goals/post 2015 development agenda, community mobilization, and new developments in human rights that relate to health and international law.

The editors also invite short letters, brief research or fieldwork summaries, and short opinion or perspective essays (up to 2,500 words) for publication as “Letters to the Editor.”

This December’s issue, a collaboration with the Open Society Foundation’s Law and Health Initiative, will focus on human rights in patient care.