The healthiest goldfish is a metaphor.

Imagine you have a goldfish. You want it to be well, so you feed it good food, you tell it to swim around its bowl regularly to get exercise, and when it’s sick you give it the best goldfish medicine. Then one day you wake up to find your fish has died. What happened to your fish?

You forgot to change its water.

The water is the world around us; it is the power, politics, and places that shape our lives. Sandro Galea’s written works are about these underlying forces that form our health. Only if we change the water can we become the healthiest goldfish.

Learn more at SandroGalea.org.

Sandro Galea is Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. He has been named an epidemiology innovator by Time, a top voice in healthcare by LinkedIn, and one of the most cited social scientists in the world. His writing and work are featured regularly in national and global public media. A native of Malta, he has served as a field physician for Doctors Without Borders and has held academic positions at Columbia University, University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. His upcoming book, The Contagion Next Time, will be published in fall 2021 and is available for pre-order: https://www.sandrogalea.org/the-contagion-next-time.

Recent Posts:

• Public Health Within Reason
• The Next Generation: The Kids Are (Probably) Alright
• Sectarianism and the Public’s Health
• The Challenge of Slow-Burning Threats
• Public Health and Tradition
• A Populist Public Health
• Reflections on The Contagion Next Time
• Why Write a Book About a Pandemic During a Pandemic?
• How Sunk-Cost Bias Can Obscure Our Vision of a Post-COVID World
• Looking Beyond Our Biases
• The Problem of Positional Bias
• Inefficiency in the Pursuit of Excellence
• Health in an Era of Resurgent Great Power Conflict
• The Consent of the Governed
• Thinking In Groups, Thinking for Ourselves (Or; In Praise of Iconoclasm)
• Resisting Our Suburban Impulses
• The Ineluctable Role of the Faceless Bureaucrat 
• Resisting the Allure of Moral Grandstanding
• The Aesthetics of a Healthier World
• How Bad Ideas Can Make Good Ones Better
• Borders In an Age of Pandemics
• The History of Soccer, the Butterfly, and Public Health
• A Playbook for Balancing the Moral and Empirical Case for Health