Hosted by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
In partnership with the UK Faculty of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine hosted a roundtable addressing the importance of the arts and humanities within public health education and training in January 2024.
Watch the full recording here.
By Elise A. Mitchell and Mathieu Corteel
This seminar examined two early public health interventions and their impact on the morals and ethics of the field. More particularly, Mitchell discussed the quarantining of slave ships during the Caribbean Slave Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. She argues that these policies and practices reasserted recently-arrived enslaved Africans’ apolitical status and rendered them expendable in order to preserve the health of those considered part of the colonial commonwealth.
Corteel looked at the assumptions surrounding 19th century health statistics, focusing on the normativity of public hygiene statistics on poverty before and during the 1832 cholera epidemic in Paris. Through this, he questions the moralistic emergence of public hygiene values through the lens of inequality.
Read more and watch the seminar here.
By Yixue Yang and Sharrona Pearl
This seminar is part of the centre for History in Public Health seminar series: Historical perspectives on ethics, morals, and values in public health. It examines the cultural and political contexts shaping historical public health interventions.
Yang explores the Protecting Students’ Eyesight Campaign in later Mao-era People’s Republic of China -1960-1976), highlighting how health guidelines transformed students’ personal habits and how the instrumentalization of youth was coated in the rhetoric of protection. Pearl discusses the history of masking and its tensions in the US, from the 19th century to Covid, emphasising the dynamics around concealing and revealing, protecting and dividing. Using a broad historical lens, she explores the history of masking, exploring various sites and domains of practice to show its consistent use as a means of protection and division.
Read more and watch the seminar here.
Decolonising Global Health Archive 