In The Colonial Politics of Global Health, Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as decolonization movements gained strength. After World War II, French officials viewed health improvements as a way to forge a more equitable union between France and its overseas territories. Through new hospitals, better medicines, and improved public health, French subjects could reimagine themselves as French citizens. The politics of health also proved vital to the United Nations, however, and conflicts arose when French officials perceived international development programs sponsored by the UN as a threat to their colonial authority. French diplomats also feared that anticolonial delegations to the United Nations would use shortcomings in health, education, and social development to expose the broader structures of colonial inequality. In the face of mounting criticism, they did what they could to keep UN agencies and international health personnel out of Africa, limiting the access Africans had to global health programs. French personnel marginalized their African colleagues as they mapped out the continent’s sanitary future and negotiated the new rights and responsibilities of French citizenship. The health disparities that resulted offered compelling evidence that the imperial system of governance should come to an end. Pearson’s work links health and medicine to postwar debates over sovereignty, empire, and human rights in the developing world. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.

"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.

Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

Thema dieses Buches ist die Organisation und Regulierung von Seuchenbekämpfung und Gesundheitsfürsorge in der britischen Kolonie South Carolina und der französischen Kolonie Louisiana zwischen 1720 und 1763. Welche Akteure waren an der Implementierung und Durchsetzung von Maßnahmen im Gesundheitsbereich beteiligt? Welche Handlungsweisen wählten sie? Diese Fragen stehen im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung. Die Autorin zeigt, dass sich die Formen lokaler politischer Organisation in den beiden Kolonien trotz der tiefgreifenden Unterschiede in Bezug auf Strukturen und Strategien der beiden Kolonialmächte stark ähnelten. Dies legt den Schluss nahe, dass die lokalen Gegebenheiten innerhalb der Kolonien einen mindestens ebenso großen Einfluss auf lokale Governanceformen hatten wie die Struktur des jeweiligen Kolonialreichs. Das Buch eröffnet damit einen frischen Blick auf die Realitäten kolonialen Regierens im frühneuzeitlichen Nordamerika. Focusing on the field of health care and disease control as a field of policy that was of pivotal importance for the existence and stability of European colonies in the south-eastern areas of the North American continent, the book analyzes modes of local organization and regulation in French Louisiana and British South Carolina during the first half of the eighteenth century. The work shows that, in spite of completely different imperial strategies and systems of rule, striking similarities existed between French and British colonies with regard to governance modes and the nature of agents involved in political organization. This attests to the fact that governance practices on the local and the colonial levels were informed at least as much by local conditions as by the nature of the empire to which the colonies respectively belonged. The work offers a fresh and unique perspective on the realities of colonial rule in early modern North America, thus challenging traditional notions which stress the differences between the French and British colonial empires in North America with regard to administrative practices.