Chapter 2 – Historical Antecedents

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the notion of health and how health has been understood historically, putting psychoneuroimmunology in the context of the evolution of thought concerning health. Health is a characteristic of life, which may be evident in the appearance and behavior of organisms. In the case of social organisms, changes in the health of one individual can affect the behavior of others. Sociocultural changes not only have an impact on health itself, but also affect how diseases are understood and labeled and how and by whom they are treated for what sort of return. The circumstances that promoted rampant spread of disease did not begin to change appreciably until well into the nineteenth century. Disease was still primarily thought of in terms of imbalance of the humors, but by 1840 the sanitation movement was driven by the view that filth caused imbalance of the humors and had as its mission to eliminate disease by getting rid of dirt. The field of psychoneuroimmunology has come into existence in relatively recent times. The term psychoneuroimmunology was first employed by Ader in 1980 to capture what had become growing evidence of the intercommunication between the brain and the immune system.