Reproductive injustice in mid-20th century Britain and America

By Ariel Hart and Michael Lambert

Photo: Francisco Venâncio

This seminar examined the values of public health work targeting maternal and child welfare in the 20th century. Hart interrogated the social, political, and radical implications of new mid-century US public health surveillance programmes, looking at Black pregancy-related mortality and public health surveillance. Lambert considered the role of UK Medical Officers of Health in perpetrating reproductive injustice, highlighting the role of Medical Officers of Health in mid 20th century Britain.

Towards decolonising higher education: a case study from a UK university

By Nancy Tamimi, Hala Khalawi, Mariama A. Jallow, Omar Gabriel Torres Valencia and Emediong Jumbo

This article presents initiatives undertaken by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM) at King’s College London (KCL), exploring avenues to decolonise higher education institutions (HEI). In 2021, GHSM executed a gap analysis of undergraduate modules, a course on decolonising research methods taught by global scholars to 40 Global South and North university students who completed pre- and post-course surveys, and semi-structured interviews with 11 academics as well as a focus group with four students exploring decolonising HEI.

(1) Gap analysis revealed a tokenistic use of Black and minority ethnic and women authors across modules’ readings. (2) The post-course survey showed that 68% strongly agreed the course enhanced their decolonisation knowledge. (3) The interviews highlighted five themes around what is decolonisation, what decolonising the curriculum should look like, how can we transform HEI, and how can we decolonise research.

Decolonising HEI must be placed within a human rights framework. HEI should integrate anti-racism agendas, give prominence to indigenous and marginalised histories and ways of knowing, dismantle power asymmetries, and create a non-hierarchical educational environment, with students leading the decolonisation process.

Read the article here.

February 2, 2024

Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India

By Kiran Kumbhar

‘Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India’ is a podcast about history and historians, hosted by Kiran Kumbhar and produced by the multilingual-multi-generational podcast platform Suno India. It explores the history of medicine and public health in India, and focuses on events and developments which occurred primarily in the 1800s, and which laid the foundations for the later development of healthcare and health policy in India.

The podcast traces the genesis of many of contemporary India’s healthcare structures and institutions, and provides the necessary historical context to why healthcare in the country today is the way it is. This knowledge about India’s medical past is provided directly by historians who have worked on medicine and public health in British colonial India. They are featured regularly in the show and also provide insights into their personal journey of becoming historians, and into how they write history and what social scientific methods they use to analyze the past and enlighten people about historical personalities, events and ideas.

Listen to the series here.

January 8, 2024

Chemonotes

By Harry M. Marks

Professor Harry M. Marks, faculty member in the Department of History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University since 1989, died on 25 January 2011, aged 64. He served on the editorial board of Social History of Medicine and was a generous and exacting reviewer for the journal. As a memorial to Pr. Marks, some of his extraordinary personal reflections during his time as an outpatient undergoing treatment for prostate cancer were collated. He periodically emailed these musings to family members, friends and colleagues. At a memorial celebration held in Baltimore in February 2011, Gert Brieger observed that Harry Marks lived his life as if in a ‘perpetual teaching moment’. These emails stand in testament not only to that, but also to Marks’ rapacious intellectual curiosity, rasping critique, sense of humour, and, not least, remarkable fortitude.

Read his reflections here.

January 8, 2024

Science for Governing Japan’s Population

By Aya Homei

Twenty-first-century Japan is known for the world’s most aged population. Faced with this challenge, Japan has been a pioneer in using science to find ways of managing a declining birth rate. Science for Governing Japan’s Population considers the question of why these population phenomena have been seen as problematic. What roles have population experts played in turning this demographic trend into a government concern? Aya Homei examines the medico-scientific fields around the notion of population that developed in Japan from the 1860s to the 1960s, analyzing the role of the population experts in the government’s effort to manage its population. She argues that the formation of population sciences in modern Japan had a symbiotic relationship with the development of the neologism, ‘population’ (jinkō), and with the transformation of Japan into a modern sovereign power. Through this history, Homei unpacks assumptions about links between population, sovereignty, and science.

Read the book here.

January 8, 2024

Latin America at the margins? Implications of the geographic and epistemic narrowing of ‘global’ health

By Amaya Perez-Brumer, David Hill and Richard Parker

Picture: Roberto Huczek

To explore the narrowing of the concept of ‘global’ in global health, this article traces how Latin America has held a place of both privilege and power as well as marginalisation in the field. The authors employ a modified extended case method to examine how Latin America has been ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ in understandings of global health, underscoring the region’s shifting role as a key site for research and practice in ‘tropical medicine’ from the mid-nineteenth century through World War II, to a major player and recipient of development assistance throughout the ‘international health’ era after World War II until the late twentieth century, to a region progressively marginalised within ‘global health’ since the mid-1980s/1990s. They argue that the progressive marginalisation of Latin America and Southern theory has not only hurt health equity and services, but also demonstrates the fundamental flaws in contemporary ‘global’ thinking. The narrowing of global health constitutes coloniality of power, with Northern institutions largely defining priority regions and epistemic approaches to health globally, thus impoverishing the field from the intellectual resources, political experience, and wisdom of Latin America’s long traditions of social medicine and collective health.

Read article here.

January 5, 2024

Wild Men in the Looking-glass

The Mythic Origins of European Otherness

By Roger Bartra

Long before the age of exploration, wild men inhabited the European imagination. These fascinating, hairy creatures have a long history of representation in art, literature, and folklore, appearing among other guises as satyrs and fauns in ancient Greece, mythical forest – and mountain-dwellers in the Middle Ages, and Shakespeare’s Caliban and Cervantes’s Cardenio in the Renaissance. Wild folk also captured the attention of naturalists, who investigated homo ferus and homo sylvestris, and philosophers, who elaborated the image of the noble savage. In Wild Men in the Looking Glass, Roger Bartra searches out the roots of the European wild man myth and explores its long evolution. Turning the tables on those who suggest that the primitive peoples “discovered” and colonized by European explorers gave rise to the myth, Bartra finds that the wild man myth preceded and helped shape European reactions to real peoples. Indeed, he shows that the wild man underpins the notion of civilization on which much of Western identity has been based. The man we recognize as “civilized” has not been able to take a single step without the shadow of the wild man at his heel.

Symptomspeak: Women’s Struggle for History and Health in Post-War Kosovo

By Hanna Kienzler

Can we feel the pain of others? How does pain connect and reach across histories, gendered realities, and social politics? How is illness shaped by context, and what kind of life worlds rise from it? Symptomspeak explores these questions among women in Kosovo and discovered a unique symptomatic language through which they communicate their pain and suffering about the Kosovo War and post-war hardships. Dr. Kienzler calls this language Symptomspeak.

Through her posts, she explores three main themes: Remembering War and Hardship; Speaking through Pain; Realms of Healing.

Discover her blog here.

December 19, 2023

Marked Women: The Cultural Politics of Cervical Cancer in Venezuela

By Rebecca G. Martinez

Cervical cancer is the third leading cause of death among women in Venezuela, with poor and working-class women bearing the brunt of it. Doctors and public health officials regard promiscuity and poor hygiene—coded indicators for low class, low culture, and bad morals—as risk factors for the disease.

Drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted in two oncology hospitals in Caracas, Marked Women is an ethnography of women’s experiences with cervical cancer, the doctors and nurses who treat them, and the public health officials and administrators who set up intervention programs to combat the disease. Rebecca G. Martínez contextualizes patient-doctor interactions within a historical arc of Venezuelan nationalism, modernity, neoliberalism, and Chavismo to understand the scientific, social, and political discourses surrounding the disease. The women, marked as deviant for their sexual transgressions, are not only characterized as engaging in unhygienic, uncultured, and promiscuous behaviors, but also become embodiments of these very behaviors. Ultimately, Marked Women explores how epidemiological risk is a socially, culturally, and historically embedded process—and how this enables cervical cancer to stigmatize women as socially marginal, burdens on society, and threats to the “health” of the modern nation.