Presents a comprehensive assessment of the histories, cultures, policies and technologies of American health and medicine between World War II and the Covid-19 pandemic Bringing together forty-five experts from the US, Canada and the UK and across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, this companion is unique in its broad assessment of the ways in which health has become an increasingly politicised concept over the last seventy-five years. It takes a multi-layered view of the development of US health care by examining its political dimensions from historical, cultural, medical, sociological, legal, ethical and environmental perspectives. Chapters consider major health institutions and the federal policies that guide them, but also explore the intersection between health and social movements, the contours of health and illness with respect to race, gender, sexuality, age and region, and the often-conflicted role the US plays in the world when it comes to health governance. The book emphasises the plurality of health experiences, balancing national and transnational perspectives with the lived realities of diverse communities that propel this groundbreaking study far beyond biomedical conceptions of health. Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Thought and Culture at the University of Leicester. Sophie A. Jones is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde.

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Thought and Culture and Head of the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. His authored books include Voices of Mental Health: Medicine, Politics, and American Culture, 1970-2000 (Rutgers University Press, 2017), Therapeutic Revolutions: Medicine, Psychiatry, and American Culture, 1945-1970 (Rutgers University Press, 2013), American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Transatlantic Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

Sophie A. Jones is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Gender Studies at the University of Strathclyde. The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Her current research investigates the medicalization of attention in contemporary US literature and culture, on which she has also published in the journal American Literary History.