
Health for all? Access to healthcare among precarious populations in Norway

In 2014, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the second-largest funder for health in the United States after the National Institutes of Health, proposed a new framework for improving population health and reducing health inequities in the United States. The core of RWJF’s ‘‘Culture of Health Action Framework’’ is the goal of ‘‘making health a shared value’’ by achieving what …
I was doing chest compressions on a 29-year-old woman who had just come up from the Emergency Room, and I was trying not to look at her face. She was gravely sick, intubated, and we had no idea what was wrong with her. When she went pulseless, we started the American Heart Association’s Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) algorithm for …
Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time — in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, …
Christian McMillen’s Discovering Tuberculosis is many things, but mostly it is an account of failure. The book is a story of disease control in the twentieth century that is anything but controlled. McMillen gives needed attention to problems of the past that find themselves – unexpectedly, dangerously – occupying our present moment (though it should be made clear from …