Medicine on a Larger Scale

Global Histories of Social Medicine

Anne Kveim Lie, Jeremy A. Greene, Warwick Anderson

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009428521
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Many Lives and Afterlives of Social Medicine
• 1 Decentering Rudolf Virchow: The Making of a Social Medicine Pioneer
• 2 Social Medicine in the Arab World: Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Praxis
• 3 Latin American Social Medicine, across the Waves
• 4 Imperial Social Medicine in Southeast Asia: The Bandung Intergovernmental Conference on Rural Hygiene
• 5 Social and Socialist: Ideas of Health, Medicine, and Society across the Iron Curtain
• 6 Social Medicine in Social Democracy
• 7 American Social Medicine in the Shadow of Socialized Medicine
• 8 A “Counter-Hegemonic” Social Medicine: Leftist Physicians during the Latin American Cold War
• 9 The African Roots of Community-Oriented Primary Care
• 10 Barefoot Doctors and Social Medicine in China
• 11 From “Saúde Pública” to “Medicina Social” to “Saúde Coletiva”: The Emergence of a Transepistemic Arena in Brazil
• 12 Settler Colonial Social Medicine and Community Health: Australasian Adaptations, Reinventions, and Denials
• 13 Social Medicine beyond Colonial Rule: The Medical Field Units of Ghana, 1930–2000
• 14 Changing Avatars of Social Medicine in the Indian Subcontinent
• 15 Social Medicine, Otherwise: Cuban Health(Care) as Political Praxis
• Afterword: Struggling with and for Social Medicine
• Afterword: The Future(s) of Social Medicine
• Index