Living Well: Thoreau, Health, and Flourishing – Annual Gathering 2026 Call for Proposals
“Nature is but another name for health,” Thoreau wrote in “Huckleberries,” an essay he left unpublished at his death at age 44 from tuberculosis. Thoreau celebrated health even as he battled his final illness. He found ways to flourish in spite of a body, and a society, that was anything but well. In our own time, when civic and natural ailments are both chronic and acute, what can Thoreau, and his time, show us about the conditions that promote flourishing—physical, mental, spiritual, social, ecological—as well as the conditions that hinder or prevent it? How can we be well in a troubled world? How can we live well in troubled times? For the 2026 Annual Gathering, we invite proposals that explore some of the many aspects of health in Thoreau’s world and ours.
While we welcome, as always, papers that reflect on Thoreau’s writings and legacy, we also welcome papers that do not center Thoreau but rather illuminate how his era more broadly experienced or thought about issues of health and reimagined the good life, seeking new ways to foster human, social, and environmental flourishing.
Potential topics include:
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Thoreau’s thoughts on, or experiences of, disease, illness, or disability
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Metaphors of health and sickness in Thoreau’s writings
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Thoreau’s conception of “the good life,” and what it means not just to live but to flourish
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Thoreau’s understanding of the relation of moral to physical wellbeing
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Thoreau’s conception of the relation of human to natural and/or social flourishing
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Thoreau and ableism
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Thoreau’s influence on theories or practices of health and wellness since the nineteenth century
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Major diseases and health challenges of the nineteenth century, including those that directly affected Thoreau’s circle, such as tuberculosis and childbirth
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Pandemics of the nineteenth century, including cholera, smallpox, yellow fever, and influenza
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The professionalization of medicine in the nineteenth century
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The proliferation of alternative medicines, therapies, and wellness cures in the nineteenth century, including homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, herbalism, vegetarianism, Grahamism, phrenology, water cures, nature cures, etc.
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Thoreau’s relation to other popular or eclectic conceptions of health, wellness, and flourishing in the nineteenth century
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Thoreau’s and/or his contemporaries’ reflections on the impacts of industrialization and settler colonialism on human and environmental health
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Indigenous perspectives on health and wellbeing and/or Thoreau’s borrowings from indigenous health and wellness traditions