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Doing Health: Chinese and Other Perspectives. In ancient China, health was related to the individual person and their unique life. Both medical and philosophical texts testify to this: Maintaining vitality in the course of one’s own lifespan was a priority. Daily caring for one’s health revolved around Qi 氣 – a universal medium that is at the same time material and spiritual, emotional and neutral, unitary and diverse, as well as biological, psychological and physiological. Health thus becomes a verb, an act, a property to be preserved, a wavering and oscillating between pleasure and strength. Not least because of the pandemic, the demand for ‘traditional’ healing expertise rose worldwide. Against this background, early Chinese views on life are of unprecedented importance: From their perspective, a reorientation of public and global health policies seems inevitable.
Images of Health and Disease: the Example of HIV/AIDS. There are two phases in the history of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. In the first of them, which lasted until the mid-1980s, HIV/AIDS was constructed as a disease of the (sexual) other. The second phase began around 1985 when the focus of AIDS prevention programs gradually shifted from „risk groups“ to „risk behavior“. This transformation came along with a reframing of the sexually active individual as self-reliant and socially responsible. Furthermore, the emergence of the risk discourse was accompanied by an iconography of a healthy and athletic „prevention body“. In the 1990s it increasingly replaced the emaciated „AIDS body“ that had dominated in the early years.
The Concept of Health in Immunology and Infection Biology: Nine Opportunities for the Future. Looking at our individual immune systems, one might get the impression that health is mostly a personal matter. However, infection biology immediately points to the fact that health is the outcome of a global joint effort undertaken not only by all humans, but actually by all living beings. From the very large to the very small, health is based on a fragile balance and the successful collaboration of numerous single entities in a highly sensitive and complex network that connects our innermost world with that of the outside. Diseases have been with us forever, and in the course of time, they shaped our political and cultural community. Yet, they also are one of the main drivers of evolutionary development. In that capacity, they have promoted progress from simple life forms to complex beings, i. e., ourselves. Thus, health can also be seen as the product of innumerable tiny coincidences. Politics, academia and society should ensure prevention of future detrimental (or harmful) coincidences with such tragic outcomes.