UC Medical Humanities Consortium

What sustains us—our bodies, our communities, our sense of who we are? In this inaugural volume of the University of California Health Humanities Review, writers, artists, scholars, clinicians, and students from across the University of California explore Sustenance in its many forms. Through essays, poetry, art, and creative nonfiction, contributors consider nourishment not simply as food, but as memory, language, caregiving, community, resilience, and human connection. Together, these works illuminate the cultural, historical, social, and ecological dimensions of health, while engaging urgent questions of justice, identity, migration, technology, and healing. Bringing creative expression into conversation with critical inquiry, this volume invites readers to consider what enables individuals and communities not only to survive, but to flourish.