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It is frequently noted that the area of study that has become known as health communication began to emerge from research in the 1940s that looked at the persuasive impact of health information and promotion, although Salmon and Poorisat (2019) point to even earlier traditions from the field of public health. This work goes back to the development of germ theory and can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century. Starting with newspapers and then moving to film, radio, and television, media campaigns about health issues began to appear. The emergence and refinement of social science research methods, including the development of Thurstone and Likert‐type scales and sampling techniques à la George Gallup, was another central factor in the progress that was made during earlier decades of the twentieth century. Salmon and Poorisat (p. 1) identify four key factors that influenced and characterized this growth:

1 the early use of mass communication for public health campaigns (1900–1910s);

2 the search for effects (1920–1930s);

3 the search for explanation from interdisciplinary perspectives (1940–1950s); and

4 the formal recognition of health communication as a distinct and valuable field of practice and research (1960s).

The reader will see these influences reflected in the theories and chapters that follow.

The Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program, which began in 1971, was also an important development in the history of health communication. During the early 1970s scholars such as Barbara Korsch and her colleagues (e.g. Korsch and Negrete, 1972) conducted work that served as the foundation of research on physician–patient communication. This work, published in such prestigious outlets as Scientific American, created interest within the broader field of communication. Some of this work was labeled “medical communication.” Simultaneously, scholars building on the interactional view articulated in Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson’s (1967) Pragmatics of Human Communication and further developing the conceptualization of communication processes offered by Gregory Bateson (1972) focused on what was called “therapeutic communication.” These traditions came together beginning in the early‐1970s to prompt the development of the new area of study called “health communication.” The inception of the Health Communication Division of the International Communication Association in 1975 (following the founding of the Health Communication Interest Group in 1972) most clearly demarcated this new area of study. The movement within medicine, public health, and the social sciences from a biomedical approach to a biopsychosocial view was simultaneously occurring (see Ho and Sharf, Chapter 14 in this volume, for more discussion of this).

The area of health communication did not take long to develop. Books on the topic, most notably Kreps and Thornton’s (1982) Health Communication: Theory and Practice, began to emerge in the early 1980s. By 1986, enough work was being conducted in the area that the publisher Lawrence Erlbaum Associates expressed interest in a journal on health communication. The first author of the present chapter, who is also the editor of the journal Health Communication, began soliciting submissions in 1987, and the first issue of the journal came out in January of 1989. The journal originally published four issues a year, but at the time of the writing of this chapter is publishing 14 lengthy issues a year. During 2019, the journal processed 776 submissions. Two hundred and nine issues of the journal have now been published. Health Communication was shortly followed by The Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, Patient Education and Counseling, Journal of Communication in Healthcare, Communication and Medicine, and several other outlets. The Journal of Health Communication began publishing in 1996. The first edition of the Handbook of Health Communication (chapters of which were translated into Korean) was published in 2003, and the second edition, The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication was published in 2011. The third edition of the handbook is in press at the time of the writing and will be published in 2021. The Sage Encyclopedia of Health Communication came out in 2014. All of these publications are evidence of the rapid growth of this area of study.

International interest in health communication has also increased notably over the last three decades. This is reflected in the subtitle of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives, but is really reflected in the work published in all the health communication outlets. The journals all receive and publish submissions from a variety of countries. As continents, Europe, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), and Asia are particularly active in health communication scholarship, as is North America. Within Europe, scholars in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK are highly involved in health communication research. The Asian countries of Korea, China, Taiwan, and Singapore are also replete with active health communication researchers. In North America, health communication research is conducted in both the US and Canada.

The initial issue of Health Communication included many invited pieces by such important scholars as Barbara Korsch, Gary Kreps, David Smith, and Jon Nussbaum. These pieces attempted to set the agenda for the field – and they did, continuing to be cited during subsequent decades. Several articles in the 100th issue of the journal referred back to these articles and identified the progress that had been made over the last 100 issues. Much advancement was, indeed, apparent. Many of the directions suggested by these scholars have now been actualized.

Early submissions to and publications in Health Communication tended to be atheoretical and offered relatively simplistic views on communicative processes, although not as simplistic as those that are still apparent in the research conducted today by submitters without a background in the social sciences. The quality and focus of most of the work that is now submitted to the journal has changed substantially in the 30‐some years in which the journal has been publishing, and work is rarely accepted for publication without a guiding theoretical foundation.

As is the case with any area of study or phenomenon, varying definitions of health communication have been offered. The process of communication focuses on simultaneous, transactional message co‐creation of meaning through interaction. Health communication focuses on such processes as they relate to and impact health and health care delivery. The primary areas of study that are the foci of health communication work include provider–patient communication, health campaigns and other types of health promotion, health information in the media, eHealth and mHealth, health risk communication, communicative processes within health organizations, and everyday health communication (see Kreps 2020, for more detailed discussion of many of these areas). Everyday health communication focuses on communication about health and as it impacts health among family members and friends, as opposed to that communication which takes place with formal health care providers and through mediated channels of communication (Cline 2011; Head and Bute 2018).