In this chapter, we first provide an overview of health and mental health outcomes across the different types of street segments studied to assess whether residents of crime hot spots have more adverse health issues compared with residents living on street segments with little or no crime. We find that there are strong relationships between mental and physical health and living in crime hot spots as opposed to non-hot spots. We then examine whether negative health outcomes are a consequence of living in a crime hot spot. We find that hot spots of crime are not simply places with high crime rates; they are also places with strong physical and mental health deficits. After accounting for selection, several physical and mental health problems are found to result from living in a crime hot spot.

Human capital – defined by education, health, and skills – is essential for economic resilience and social cohesion. This chapter analyses how inclusive investment in people drives innovation, reduces inequality, and strengthens institutions. It critiques underinvestment in public services and challenges the idea that human development is a luxury. Drawing on comparative data, the chapter shows that equitable access to quality education and healthcare correlates strongly with long-term growth and democratic stability. Prosperity begins with people.

Chapter 2 turns to the second betrayal. This chapter scales down into the personal accounts of test veterans post-service lives, when emergent illnesses eluded explanation and social recognition, and private shame and debility stalled their lives. I show how unsettled memories and unsettled illnesses coalesced with the slow-moving invisibility of radiation in ways that negatively impacted their families and their well-being. Claim-making thus began as prefigurative struggles driven by delegitimating encounters with medical actors, and the accumulating acts of sharing service memories in veteran spaces. This chapter charts how in these practices test veterans and their family members became claim-makers, a collectivity that produced the possibilities for political and legal action.

This chapter offers readers perspective on ideals and practices that shaped health-related treatment of former service members from the Revolutionary period through the end of the Cold War. Studying how veterans fought for and accessed health services over two centuries offers a compelling view of the wide-ranging impacts of military endeavors on policy and politics and on the individual lives of service members and civilians. It also brings into sharp relief the extent to which norms of civilian society – for example, changing perceptions of how diseases are classified and what constitutes proper care – influence wars and perceptions of them. Broadly, the chapter shows that, while veterans’ care became more bureaucratized and institutionalized over time, some realities were constant: the nature and extent of available services, and the ways people interpreted them, were dictated by former service members’ advocacy, as well as prevailing notions about governmental responsibility, illness and disease, disability, and medical practice. Most broadly, the history of veterans’ experiences related to health care reveals that war and society are inextricably and intricately linked.

Human flourishing is a fundamental goal of most societies, and various theories have approached this concept, including the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, self-determination theory (SDT), and the integrative model of behavioural prediction (IMBP). These theories focus on different aspects of well-being and the factors that influence an individual’s ability to lead a fulfilling life. This chapter aims to explore the capability approach (CA) and examines how it complements and connects with these existing theories. This chapter demonstrates how, by emphasising the importance of individual capabilities and human agency, the CA broadens the applicability of these theories. Unlike classical models that focus primarily on analysing situations, the CA highlights the broader context, aiming to enhance flourishing by considering situational determinants and the impact of contextual factors on an individual’s ability to make meaningful choices. This chapter contributes to a more nuanced understanding of human flourishing by illustrating the synergies between the CA model and other theoretical models. It argues that to be truly comprehensive and effective in the real world, theories must embrace the transformative potential of the CA.

Between 2010 and 2012, a catastrophic earthquake sequence devastated Christchurch, a colonial city built on Ngāi Tahu ancestral land in Canterbury, New Zealand. This chapter explores how government agencies, including public health services, collaborated with mana whenua (Ngāi Tahu, the local Māori tribe) to rebuild Ōtautahi Christchurch in ways that respect its colonial past while looking to a climate-challenged future. The rebuild sought to integrate natural environmental features and symbolic markers significant to mana whenua, while also promoting health, wellbeing, and a renewed sense of place for all residents. Writing as three Tangata Tiriti (settler-colonial) women, we draw on our professional roles in public health, urban design, landscape architecture, and strategic planning. We reflect on our involvement in planning and policy implementation, considering what worked well, what fell short, and our hopes for a future city that fosters resilience, inclusivity, and belonging.

Chapter 1 tracks frenzy’s trajectory as a medical diagnosis between 1500 and 1700. It offers an introduction to frenzy as it was understood by eight medical practitioners, four of whom came of age in a time of relative stability in English medicine (1560–1640) and four in a time of rapid change (1640–1700). It shows how, from the mid seventeenth century, the old humoral definition of frenzy was altered to fit new medical philosophies – chemical, mechanistic, and corpuscular – and new models of human physiology. Tracing the contours of the disease over two centuries, it highlights points of continuity as well as change. Throughout this period, it argues, theorists from diverse schools explained frenzy’s effects with reference both to the solid structures of the body and the fluids which flowed through them. This chapter argues that it was the devastating effects of brain disease which galvanized medical theorists to seek to explain disorders of the mind as disruptions of material ‘animal spirits’.

Ginsberg was famous for chronicling every facet of his life, and his last poems in the mid 1990s frequently reflect an intense self-consciousness about his final illnesses. While earlier in his career, the body was an important site for Ginsberg’s poetics of candor, confrontation, and erotic epiphanies, he remained equally adamant as his health faltered in ascertaining his physical deterioration in poems such as “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” and “Sphincter.” Even during his final period, however, Ginsberg’s level of literary fame provided him access to figures in popular music that amplified his cultural prominence and enabled him to retain a sense of artistic relevance. Simultaneously with his meditations on death, Ginsberg’s culminating poems maintained his renowned sly humor about his social status as a writer whose expansive cultural reputation included the continuity of radical political critique. This chapter on his posthumous volume Death and Fame: Last Poems 1993–1997 (1999) explores Ginsberg’s attempts to reconcile the problematic contexts of fame’s durability while struggling to find succor, in both Buddhist and poetic terms, with his accelerating disability and terminal departure.

Medical experts and epidemiologists knew the importance of hygiene on the home front. They convinced local, state, and federal authorities that the war on disease had to be fought. Consequently, the Modern Health Crusade, which originated in Detroit, became a nationwide movement in 1915. Federal authorities realized that a high infant mortality rate threatened the fabric of American society in the long run. Additionally, in order to build a strong and healthy army (and nation), bodies had to be physically fit. Children began to matter to the military and the nation writ large. As hygiene became a national concern, between 1914 and 1918, both medical and military authorities promoted hygienic standards to lift the nation.