The interdisciplinary study of health communication and its relationship to communication science

This chapter was chosen to begin this volume be-cause it was one of the earliest articles to describe health communication as a field of study.Moreover, this chapter illustrates how health topics fit into the communication discipline, as well as which tra-ditions informed the development of health com-munication as an area of inquiry. The authors demonstrate that, from the beginning, the area of health communication went outside the walls of academia to study the ways in which communica-tion theories and practices could contribute to areas of everyday life. Health communication scholars frequently draw from interpersonal, group, and organizational communication theory as well as research in public health,medical sociol