This essay identifies recent trends in the field of health humanities and reflects on their relevance for the study of nineteenth-century US literature, as well as on the contribution of Americanist literary criticism to health humanities enquiries. It first shows how health humanities scholarship invites us to think about body and mind as inextricable. It then demonstrates how a nondualist focus on the bodymind helps articulate the complexities of the experience of pain. As a wide array of nineteenth-century literary texts attests, bodyminds in pain ask to be understood through interconnected scales ranging from the singular to the collective, from the intimate to the social, from the microbiotic to the biopolitical. The final section thus considers the bodymind as a liminal site where these scalar dynamics intersect, turning to the way metabolic processes mediate conditions of health and illness while serving as an analytic for investigating wider biopolitical anxieties. Through the example of Henry James’s ambiguous valuation of “munching” at the turn of the twentieth century, when conditions such as obesity and diabetes emerged as alleged diseases of modernity, the essay concludes by pondering the entanglements between literature, foodways, and health as a fruitful avenue for further enquiry.