The Medicine & Its Objects Workshop joins the Transnational Approaches to Modern Europe Workshop to Present:
Presenter: Dora Vargha | Professor of History and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter
Discussant: Misha Appeltova | Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences, University of Chicago
Wednesday, April 20th from 4:30-6:00pm CT
Social Sciences Tea Room (SSRB 201)*
*This event will be in-person only
To RSVP and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper, please email mmacgregor@uchicago.edu
Abstract: From Virchow to Allende, social medicine had been intertwined with left-wing or socialist political thought for over a century. While the prominence or the significance of this connection ebbed and flowed in Western Europe and North America, the basic tenets underpinning social medicine gained new purchase in the ‘Global East’ with the rise of state socialism and the emergence of a socialist world. Ideas around the role of social, environmental and economic factors in health coupled with revolutionary aims of new socialist regimes. What constituted ‘socialist medicine’ and in what way did this, ideologically based concept prevalent in the East relate to ideas of ‘social medicine’ in the West during the Cold War? Focusing on post-war Eastern Europe, this paper traces connections between socialist politics and health in emerging practices and ideas to map divergences and overlaps in what became a key issue in the Cold War that, at least in its rhetoric, set apart East and West.
