HMS Lent 2017
Optional Module
History of Medicine: Histories of Public and Environmental Health
Mary Brazelton
This module will introduce students to the histories and historiographies of public and environmental health, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Modern processes of industrialization, urbanization, and migration have shaped the health of peoples and environments around the world. After an orientation to the history of public health, we will examinethese trends in the realms of environmental health, global health, and nutrition. Key themes includeissues of risk to bodies, places, and populations; changing roles of expertise; and the authority of the state.
Session 1: Public health histories
This session provides a graduate-level introduction to the history of public health. How is the history of public health distinct from that of disease? How are we to understand the origins and consequences of particular epidemics in history? How did concepts and practices of public health evolve, especially after the rise of bacteriology – and how did they differ from place to place? We will consider these questions and other key issues that include the quantification of health, tensions between private rights and public interests, and the role of the state in governing the health of populations.
Readings:
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “The Black Death: End of a paradigm,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002), 703-38.
Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Harvard, 1998),ch 6 (135-154).
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China(University of California, 2003), ch 8 (225-253).
Supplementary readings:
BarbaraGutmannRosenkrantz,PublicHealthandtheState:ChangingViewsinMassachusetts,1842-1936(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress,1972).
Charles Rosenberg, “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (1992)
Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962)
Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Diseases, Theories, and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865-1900 (2000)
David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (1995)
Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio before F.D.R. (1992)
Allan M. Brandt, Allan M. No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States (1985, rprt. 1987)
Keith Wailoo, Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (2001)
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (2001)
Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization, and the State: A History of Public Health from Ancient to
Modern Times, Parts II, III, and IV (1999)
Questions:
- Describe the relationship of bacteriology to public health in the late nineteenth century.
- Give a brief explanation of the relationship between sanitary science and Chinese weisheng.
Session 2: Imperial orders and international health
Insalubrious environments posed serious risks for nineteenth-century imperial powers seeking to expand their territorial holdings in the tropics. This session examines the links between contemporary global health and its roots in international and colonial medical organizations. In the nineteenth century, colonial settings became key sites of biomedical research and development. This session will explore the means by which empires and transnational organizations gained the authority to make health interventions in a variety of non-Western contexts, and the eventual emergence of discourses of global health in the twentieth century.
Readings:
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (University of California, 1993), ch4 (159-199).
Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Duke, 2006), ch 4 (104-129).
Ted Brown, Marcos Cueto, and Elizabeth Fee, “The Transition from ‘International’ to ‘Global’ Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 1 (Jan 2006): 62-72.
Steven Palmer, Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation (Michigan, 2010), ch. 2 (55-88).
Supplementary readings:
Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (2004)
Paul Weindling, ed., International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918-1939 (1995)
John Etting, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (1981)
John Farley, To Cast out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913-1951). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Shula Marks, “What is Colonial about Colonial Medicine?,” Social History of Medicine 10(2)
(1996): 205-21.
Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventative Medicine, 1859-1914 (1994)
Philip D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (1998)
LeonoreManderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870-1940 (1996)
Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. (2002)
JavedSiddiqi, World Health and World Politics: The World Health Organization and the UN
System (1995)
Anne-EmanuelleBirn, Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International History and Revolutionary Mexico (2006)
Questions:
- How would you characterize the connection between colonial medicine and global health?
- Where and when did global health originate?
Session 3: Toxic lands, toxic bodies
This session will explore the connections between diseased landscapes and diseased bodies, and will consider in particular how environmental and technological change feature in histories of human health. Because histories of environmental healthoften provide sober reminders that the costs of environmental degradation are not borne equally but rather affect marginalized populations far more significantly, this session will also consider the pursuit of environmental justice as a facet of historical scholarship.
Readings:
Nancy Langston, "The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health," Environmental History 13, no. 1 (2008): 41–65.
Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (2006), chapter 4, pp. 127–169
Brett Walker, Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan (2010), chapter 4, pp. 108–136
Supplementary readings:
Randall M. Packard, White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (1989)
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and Politics of Occupational
Disease in Twentieth-Century America (1991)
DavidRosnerandGeraldE.Markowitz,DeceitandDenial:TheDeadlyPoliticsof
IndustrialPollution(Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress,2002).
John F. Hutchinson, “Disasters and the International Order: Earthquakes, Humanitarians, and the Ciraolo Project,” International History Review 22, no. 1 (March 2000), 1-36.
Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space:How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
MartinMelosi,TheSanitaryCity:UrbanInfrastructureinAmericafromColonialTimestothe Present (Baltimore:JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress,2000).
ClaudiaClark,RadiumGirls:WomenandIndustrialHealthReform,1910 – 1935 (ChapelHill:UniversityofNorthCarolinaPress,1997)
Questions:
- In what ways, if any, is it useful for historians to distinguish a category of "environmental" issues in exploring the histories of public health?
- What is "hybrid causation" and how useful is this concept in understanding the histories of health problems arising from pollutants such as industrial waste or agro-chemical runoff?
Session 4: Food, Farms, and Health
This session will take a critical look at the literature on the rise of industrial agriculture and modern food industriesand the relationship of these to public health. Today, many observers attribute a global"obesity epidemic" to the ubiquity of cheap industrial food and to the policies and technologies that make this ubiquity possible; they simultaneously decry the nutritional deficiencies of human diets increasingly based on processed food products created from a handful of global commodity crops. This session will consider those perspectives alongside counter-narratives that emphasize the inadequacies of popular "obesity epidemic" theses, the role of health concerns in driving the rise of industrial food, and the existence of creative cultural responses to industrial food products.
Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (2012), chapter 4, pp. 105–131
Julie Guthman, "Can't Stomach it: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos," Gastromica7, no. 3 (Summer 2007)
Michael Pollan, "The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity," New York Times, 12 October 2003
Supplementary readings:
Kathleen Mapes, Sweet Tyranny: Migrant Labor, Industrial Agriculture, and Imperial Politics (University of Illinois, 2010)
Christopher Henke, Cultivating Science, Harvesting Power: Science and Industrial Agriculture in California (MIT, 2008)
Giovanni Federico, Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000 (Princeton, 2005)
Helen Curry, Evolution Made to Order(Chicago, 2016)
Wilson Warren, Tied to the Great Meatpacking Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking (Iowa, 2007)
LorineSwainston Goodwin. The Pure Food, Drink, and Drug Crusaders, 1879-1914.Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999.
Matthew Smith. Another Person’s Poison: A History of Food Allergy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
Sidney W. Mintz. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
- "The obesity epidemic is caused by the abundance and availability of cheap, processed, energy-dense foods." Do you agree or disagree with this claim, and why or why not?
- Is white bread a health food?
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