The Environment Forum with David Jones | "Inherently Limited by Our Imaginations:" Health Anxieties, Politics, and the History of the Climate Crisis

The Environment Forum is dedicated to exploring new work in the arts and humanities that reframes or reimagines the relationship of humanity to the rest of nature. David Jones is the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard. His initial research focused on epidemics among American Indians, resulting in a book, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. His next project, Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care, examined the history of decision making in cardiac therapeutics. He has published widely in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences and other venues, on these two topics as well as about human subjects research, Cold War medicine, HIV, planetary health, race, and the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently at work on four other book projects, including histories of the evolution of coronary artery surgery, of heart disease and cardiac therapeutics in India, and of the threat of air pollution to health in both India and the United States.