Particularly for the modern period, one of the most significant differences between ‘straight’ history and the history of medicine is that whilst the standard object of inquiry for the former is the nation (German history, French history, etc), the standard object of inquiry for the latter is something else (bedside medicine, laboratory medicine, clinical medicine, etc).

But, if this is the case, how do we as historians of medicine deal with difference, particularly geographical difference?

For this seminar, please

1) read the following

Warwick Anderson, ‘Where is the postcolonial history of medicine?’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72, 3, (1998), pp. 522-530.

Sarah Hodges, ‘On the possibilities for global histories of medicine’ (ms draft to be circulated by attachment)

2) Think of two examples relevant to your research interests (anecdotes, objects, theorems, people, etc). Can you think of (or better yet, bring in) one example where place seems relevant to what is significant about the example, and another example where location seems irrelevant?

Further reading

Maneesha Lal, “The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, 1885-1888.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68, 1 (1994), pp. 29-66.

Radhika Ramasubban, “Imperial health in British India, 1857-1900”. In Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.

David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Sarah Hodges, “Looting the Lock Hospital in Colonial Madras during the Famine Years of the 1870s”, Social History of Medicine 18, 3 (2005): 379-98.

John Farley, Bilharzia: A History of Imperial Tropical Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

 

Michael Worboys, “Tropical Diseases”. In W. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine (London, 1997), pp. 512-536.

Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Douglas M. Haynes, “Social Status and Imperial Service: Tropical Medicine and the British Medical Profession in the Nineteenth Century”. In David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 209-226.

John Farley, To Cast out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951) (Oxford: OUP, 2004).

Paul Weindling (ed), International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918-

1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Paul Weindling, “Philanthropy and World Health: The Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations Health Organization”, Minerva 35 (1997): 269-81.

Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-1965

 

Sung Lee, “WHO and the Developing World: The Contest for Ideology” in Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge, eds Bridie Andrews and Andrew Cunningham (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 27-45.

World Health Organization, Four Decades of Achievement: Highlights of the Work of the WHO

 

Milton Roemer, “Internationalism in Medicine and Public Health”, in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 1417-35

Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonialism” in A Dying Colonialism (1959).

Warwick Anderson, “The Third World Body” Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Companion to Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. [ ]

D. Puaksom, “Of Germs, Public Hygiene and the Healthy Body: The Making of the Medicalizing State in Thailand”. Journal of Asian Studies 66, 2 (2007): 311-344.