Editorial Launching a new academic journal in this age of proliferating publications requires some justiication, or at the very least a brief explanation. Health and illness are an intrinsic element of culture, and in an increasingly globalized world, health concerns and approaches to healthcare are inextricably linked with the oten radically diferent cultures of patients, clinicians, and researchers. While modern medical applications have not least contributed to a signiicant increase in life expectancy, concomitantly new complex problems have arisen from developments such as the use of modern technologies at the beginning and end of life, reproductive medicine, organ transplantation, or the decoding of the human genome and subsequent genomic intervention. Considering that these interventions are being used in a globalized world, the ensuing problems are of lasting intimate concern to members of all the various cultural spheres found around the globe and accordingly call for culturally appropriate ethical sensitivity towards the ever-changing normative and ontological aspects of health and illness. In today’s world, eforts to ease inevitable tensions and potential conlicts of interest require the input of the humanities more than ever. Of particular relevance in this regard are studies and analyses by scholars and scientists from diferent parts of the globe working within cognate disciplines. On behalf of the Beşikçizade Center for Medical Humanities (Beşikçizade Tıp ve İnsani Bilimler Merkezi—BETİM), we intend to provide a forum for an interdisciplinary discussion of health-related issues and encourage exchange and interaction between researchers involved in these ields. his journal, associated with the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine through four of its editors who are members of the school’s Department for History of Medicine and Ethics invites contributions from the humanities and human sciences investigating the interaction between health and illness concepts and the notion of culture. In creating this platform, we aim at illing a signiicant gap in the international academic landscape. While our journal is open to all social and human sciences and humanities related to culture, we want to accentuate the relevance of three disciplines in particular, namely, medical history, epidemiology, and medical ethics. Background for this emphasis is a project that some of the editors embarked upon in 2009, leading to an ongoing international cooperation. In that year, under the roof of the medical faculty of Mainz University in Germany, researchers from the department for history, philosophy, and ethics of medicine and the department of epidemiology came together and approached colleagues Owner Ahmet Özdemir, on behalf of Hayat Sağlık ve Sosyal Hizmetler Vakfı Managing Editor Hakan Ertin Editors-in-chief Mustafa Kemal Temel Rainer Brömer Editors Hakan Ertin İlhan İlkılıç Hajo Zeeb Design Ahmet Yumbul Printing–Binding Pınarbaş Matbaacılık Ltd. Şti. 0212 544 58 77 Contact Küçükmühendis Sk 7, 34096 Istanbul TURKEY +90 (212) 588 2545 +90 (212) 632 8579 ISSN 2458-8113 Published biannually. Authors are responsible for the content of the articles published in this journal. © Copyright reserved by the publisher. Quotes can be used provided full reference is given. June 2016 . Volume 1 . Issue 1 Journal of Health & Culture