Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This review considers three monographs that use innovative archival recovery techniques to expand our understanding of the connections between the history of science and medicine and sociopolitical and cultural phenomena across the early modern period to the present. Divided into three sections, our review first considers Kalle Kananoja's Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850, which demonstrates the ways that Atlantic African healers resisted colonial influence and adapted their practices to reflect innovative uses of global plant-based medicines. Part 2 of this review, Black Reproductive Health, examines Sara Clarke Kaplan's The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood, which, importantly, revises longstanding assumptions about the ways that we understand and document reproductive health and justice, especially in the American Black community. Part 3, 'Healthy' Eating, discusses Elizabeth A. Williams's Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950, which deconstructs the so-called connection between appetite and wellness in science and medicine. We have chosen to focus on these works both for the important new insights that they offer to the field of the history of science and because they each speak to contemporary crises in public health and health inequity that continue to affect our local and global landscapes. We suggest that works such as these have the capacity not only to expand our field but also to counteract narratives of white supremacy and other cultural beliefs that stigmatize and oppress; these works show us how expanding our understanding of the origins and current practices of medical knowledge beyond our traditional Western narratives can help provide healthier and more equitable forms of care and wellness.

AbstractGiven the exigencies of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have chosen to focus our review of science and medicine studies to feature works that speak to three core concerns that have emerged from this global and sociopolitical health crisis. The monographs that we explore here grapple with the following related questions: (1) How we understand, prepare for, and succeed or fail in preventing and responding to pandemics in a global economy; (2) How the origins of health epidemics and pandemics are imbricated in Western imperial violence and global capitalist structures; (3) How the development, circulation, and protocols of public health, health-care systems, and modern medicine have emerged in response to colonialism, global expansion, and their attendant environmental and health crises. Readers will note that both works reviewed here take as given the undeniable influence of colonial legacies on conceptions and treatments of disease. To our mind, these works are additionally remarkable in the ways that they foreground subjects and methods, whether non-Western or nonhuman animal, that are typically subordinated or historically neglected in studies of the history of medicine.