Health is commonly experienced and understood in a variety of ways, including the absence of disease, but also more positively, as functional vitality or as a resource. Scholarly debates about the definition have evolved around a binary opposition between health as a natural phenomenon and health as a socially constructed category. However, when examining how concepts of health function in society, instead of attempting to rigorously define health, it may be more useful to explore how health is “talked about” in different contexts. The papers collected in this special issue do so with regard to different periods and cultures in East Asia and as such contribute to recent efforts in the health and medical humanities to elucidate the multiple meanings of health.
