headhunting Practice of removing, displaying, and in some cases pre¬ serving human heads. Headhunting arises in some cultures from a belief in the existence of a more or less material soul that resides in the head.
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health ► heart I 851
The headhunter seeks, through decapitation of his enemies, to transfer this soul matter to himself and his community. Headhunting is thus sometimes found with certain forms of cannibalism as well as with human sacrifice. It has been practiced worldwide and may date to Paleolithic times. The region of Assam in northeastern India was home to many headhunting peoples. In South America, the skull was removed and the skin was packed with hot sand to create a shrunken head.
health Extent of continuing physical, emotional, mental, and social abil¬ ity to cope with one’s environment. Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive concept than mere absence of disease, and there is a variable area between health and disease. A person may be in good physical condition but have a cold or be mentally ill. Someone may appear healthy but have a serious condition (e.g., cancer) that is detect¬ able only by physical examination or diagnostic tests or not even by these.
health insurance System for the advance financing of medical expenses through contributions or taxes paid into a common fund to pay for all or part of health services specified in an insurance policy or law. The key elements are advance payment of premiums or taxes, pooling of funds, and eligibility for benefits on the basis of contributions or employ¬ ment without an income or assets test. Health insurance may apply to a limited or comprehensive range of medical services and may provide for full or partial payment of the costs of specific services. Benefits may con¬ sist of the right to certain medical services or reimbursement of the insured for specified medical costs. Private health insurance is organized and administered by an insurance company or other private agency; public health insurance is run by the government (see social insurance). Both forms of health insurance are to be distinguished from socialized medi¬ cine and government medical-care programs, in which doctors are employed directly or indirectly by the goverment, which also owns the health-care facilities (e.g., Britain’s National Health Service). See also
INSURANCE.
health maintenance organization (HMO) Public or private organization providing comprehensive medical care to subscribers on the basis of a prepaid contract. HMOs deliver a broad range of health ser¬ vices for a fixed fee. In the prepaid group-practice model, physicians are organized into a group practice with one insuring agency. A medical care foundation, or individual practice association, usually involves multiple insurance companies and reimburses members of a loose network of indi¬ vidual physicians from subscribers’ prepaid fees. Originally viewed as a way to control health-care costs and meet increased demand for health services, HMOs have become controversial because some limit care by refusing to pay for tests or treatment against their own doctors’ advice.
Healy, T(imothy) M(ichael) (b. May 17, 1855, Bantry, County Cork, Ire.—d. March 26, 1931, Dublin) Irish political leader. Soon after he entered Parliament in 1880, the “Healy Clause” of the Land Act of 1881, protecting tenant farmers’ agrarian improvements from rent increases, made him popular in Ireland. Long associated with Charles Stewart Parnell, he broke with him in 1886. He grew dissatisfied with both the Liberals and the Irish Nationalists in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, and after 1917 he supported Sinn Fein. He was supported by both the British and Irish min¬ istries as governor-general (1922-28) of the new Irish Free State.
Heaney \'he-ne\, Seamus (Justin) (b. April 13, 1939, near Cas- tledawson. County Londonderry, N.Ire.) Irish poet. After studying at Queen’s University in Belfast, he became a teacher and lecturer. Appalled by the violence in his native Northern Ireland, he moved to the Republic of Ireland in 1972. In recent years he has taught at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. His works, rooted in Northern Irish rural life, evoke histori¬ cal events and draw on Irish myth, but they also reflect the land’s recent troubled decades. His collections include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), North (1975), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and The Spirit Level (1996). Pre¬ occupations (1980) consists of essays on poetry and poets. He also made a noteworthy translation of Beowulf. He received the Nobel Prize for Lit¬ erature in 1995.
hearing In law, a trial, or more specifically the formal examination of a cause before a judge according to the laws of the land. In popular usage the term often refers to a formal proceeding before a magistrate prior to the inception of a case, and in particular to a preliminary hearing, where a magistrate or judge determines whether the evidence justifies proceed¬ ing with the case.
hearing or audition or sound reception Physiological process of perceiving sound. Hearing entails the transformation of sound vibrations into nerve impulses, which travel to the brain and are interpreted as sounds. Members of two animal groups, arthropods and vertebrates, are capable of sound reception. Hearing enables an animal to sense danger, locate food, find mates, and, in more complex creatures, engage in com¬ munication (see animal communication). All vertebrates have two ears, often with an inner chamber housing auditory hair cells (papillae) and an outer eardrum that receives and transmits sound vibrations. Localization of sound depends on the recognition of minute differences in intensity and in the time of arrival of the sound at the two ears. Sound reception in mammals is generally well developed and often highly specialized, as in bats and dolphins, which use echolocation, and whales and elephants, which can hear mating calls from tens or even hundreds of miles away. Dogs and other canines can similarly detect faraway sounds. The human ear can detect frequencies of 20-20,000 hertz (Hz); it is most sensitive to those between 1,000 and 3,000 Hz. Impulses travel along the central auditory pathway from the cochlear nerve to the medulla to the cerebral cortex. Hearing may be impaired by disease, injury, or old age; some dis¬ orders, including deafness, may be congenital. See also hearing aid.
hearing aid Device that increases the loudness of sounds in the user’s EAR. Its principal components are a microphone, an amplifier, and an ear¬ phone. Hearing aids are increasingly smaller and less conspicuous, fitting behind the earlobe or within the ear canal. They have widely differing characteristics, amplifying different components of speech sounds for maximum comprehension by each wearer. Hearing aids with automatic volume control vary the amplification automatically with the input.
Hearn, (Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos) Japanese Koi¬ zumi Yalcumo (b. June 27, 1850, Levkas, Ionian Islands, Greece—d. Sept. 26, 1904, Okubo, Japan) Irish-U.S.-Japanese writer, translator, and teacher. He immigrated to the U.S. at age 19 and worked as a reporter and translator, writing on a wide range of subjects. In 1890 he traveled as a magazine writer to Japan, where he soon became a teacher, took a Japa¬ nese wife and name, and became a Japanese subject. Articles and books about Japan’s customs, religion, and literature followed, including Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Exotics and Retrospective (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), and A Japanese Miscellany (1901); Kwaidan (1904) is a collection of supernatural stories and haiku translations. It was Hearn who, perhaps more than any other single per¬ son, introduced the broad culture of Japan to the West.