These are questions the senior editor has asked of his classes at Cornell University and at Heidelberg University (Germany) the last several years. The students are among the best in their respective nations. Almost none of them recognize either name, much less what they contributed to psychology. That’s a shame, because contemporary memory research would look very different, and much the worse, were it not for the influences of Bower and Tulving. The names of earlier greats of the field – Clark Hull, Edwin Guthrie, Edward Tolman, George Kelly, Julian Rotter, Eleanor Gibson, even Edward Titchener (an early Cornell psychologist) – draw similar blank looks from Sternberg’s students. The students know neither who these great psychologists were nor, more importantly, what they contributed to the intellectual history of the field. The students know a few names from the past – Freud, Piaget, Skinner – but often have only rather vague ideas of what these thinkers proposed, as much of what they did is viewed today as “history.”

Across time and place, there have been many intellectual and practical traditions regarding the relations among mind, body, and health. This chapter provides a brief overview of these rich traditions but focuses on their relevance to the emergence and subsequent development of the contemporary field of health psychology in the last third of the twentieth century in the United States. Over its relatively brief history as a field within psychology, health psychology quickly became clinically focused in the United States in order to succeed as part of biomedicine’s allied health professions, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses that membership in such professions entail. The chapter also provides a brief account of three other contemporary expressions of health psychology – community, critical, and public health – that have made important contributions to our understanding of mind and health.