European public health was a playing field for deeply contradictory impulses throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s, international agencies were established with great fanfare and postwar optimism to serve as the watchtower of health the world over. Within less than a decade, local-level institutions began to emerge as seats of innovation, initiative, and expertise. But there was continual counterpressure from nation-states that jealously guarded their policymaking prerogatives in the face of the push for cross-national standardization and the emergence of original initiatives from below. In contrast to histories of twentieth-century public health that focus exclusively on the local, national, or international levels, Shifting Boundaries explores the connections or "zones of contact" between the three levels. The interpretive essays, written by distinguished historians of public health and medicine, focus on four topics: the oscillation between governmental and nongovernmental agencies as sites of responsibility for addressing public health problems; the harmonization of nation-states' agendas with those of international agencies; the development by public health experts of knowledge that is both placeless and respectful of place; and the transportability of model solutions across borders. The volume breaks new ground in its treatment of public health as a political endeavor by highlighting strategies to prevent or alleviate disease as a matter not simply of medical techniques but political values and commitments. Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Iris Borowy, James A. Gillespie, Graham Mooney, Lion Murard, Dorothy Porter, Sabine Schleiermacher, Susan Gross Solomon, Paul Weindling, and Patrick Zylberman. Susan Gross Solomon is professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Lion Murard and Patrick Zylberman are both senior researchers at CERMES (Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé et Société), CNRS-EHESS-INSERM, Paris.

First published in 1999, this volume aims to go beyond this debate is to explore the factors which have contributed to women’s exclusion from rights and full citizenship. Beginning by linking the construction of a dichotomous relationship between public and private spheres to the theory and practice of women’s exclusion, it attempts to move beyond critique and open up an alternative, more positive project. More than a feminist analysis, this project is fundamental to constructing a new understanding of politics and the political process.

This book comprehensively explores social, political and cultural dimensions of health in contemporary society. It addresses many issues and pertinent questions, including the following: Are we over diagnosed and over medicated? How can patients participate in their own care? Do pharmaceutical companies coerce us into medication regimes? What drives inequalities in health outcomes? What is the experience of health care for indigenous communities? Why do different countries have such different health care systems? How do we respond to life-changing conditions? Can we achieve a ‘good death’? How do new genetics shape our identities? Is public health a force of liberation or disempowerment? The book incorporates the range of levels of influence on health, covering individual patient experiences, the health professions, multinational corporations, the state, global organisations as well as examining trends in social organisation, cultural expression and technological developments. It volume provides an accessible, yet in-depth, overview and discussion of the sociology of health. The chapters include an illustrative case study and further readings relating to the topic.

THE CRITICAL WORK IN GLOBAL HEALTH, NOW COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED "This book compels us to better understand the contexts in which health problems emerge and the forces that underlie and propel them." -Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu H1N1. Diabetes. Ebola. Zika. Each of these health problems is rooted in a confluence of social, political, economic, and biomedical factors that together inform our understanding of global health. The imperative for those who study global health is to understand these factors individually and, especially, synergistically. Fully revised and updated, this fourth edition of Oxford's Textbook of Global Health offers a critical examination of the array of societal factors that shape health within and across countries, including how health inequities create consequences that must be addressed by public health, international aid, and social and economic policymaking. The text equips students, activists, and health professionals with the building blocks for a contextualized understanding of global health, including essential threads that are combined in no other work: · historical dynamics of the field · the political economy of health and development · analysis of the current global health structure, including its actors, agencies, and activities · societal determinants of health, from global trade and investment treaties to social policies to living and working conditions · the role of health data and measuring health inequities · major causes of global illness and death, including under crises, from a political economy of health vantage point that goes beyond communicable vs. non-communicable diseases to incorporate contexts of social and economic deprivation, work, and globalization · the role of trade/investment and financial liberalization, precarious work, and environmental degradation and contamination · principles of health systems and the politics of health financing · community, national, and transnational social justice approaches to building healthy societies and practicing global health ethically and equitably Through this approach the Textbook of Global Health encourages the reader -- be it student, professional, or advocate -- to embrace a wider view of the global health paradigm, one that draws from political economy considerations at community, national, and transnational levels. It is essential and current reading for anyone working in or around global health.

The Post-Communist World in the Twenty-First Century presents studies by senior scholars and practitioners that are highly relevant to contemporary political challenges. The democratic vision that accompanied the collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and East Central Europe has been replaced by a range of authoritarian, semi-authoritarian and democratic regimes, and growing division between Western and Russian influence. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to renewed tensions and international crisis. China, which presents major challenges to the US, Europe, and the global order, has emerged as a critical actor in the international conflict. The need to understand the internal dynamics and international behavior of communist and authoritarian regimes is more urgent at this time. The expertise provided by the volume’s contributors is especially timely, offering new insights into the past and contemporary politics of these states, the agendas driving their behavior, regimes’ domestic strengths and weaknesses, and the role of leaders’ differing perceptions in exacerbating international conflict. Practitioners demonstrate how such knowledge can inform effective policy and ameliorative efforts.

In The Doctor Who Would Be King Guillaume Lachenal tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Jean Joseph David, a French colonial army doctor who governed an entire region of French Cameroon during World War II. Dr. David—whom locals called “emperor”—dreamed of establishing a medical utopia. Through unchecked power, he imagined realizing the colonialist fantasy of emancipating colonized subjects from misery, ignorance, and sickness. Drawing on archives, oral histories, and ethnographic fieldwork, Lachenal traces Dr. David’s earlier attempts at a similar project on a Polynesian island and the ongoing legacies of his failed experiment in Cameroon. Lachenal does not merely recount a Conradian tale of imperial hubris, he brings the past into the present, exploring the memories and remains of Dr. David’s rule to reveal a global history of violence, desire, and failure in which hope for the future gets lost in the tragic comedy of power.

This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought. Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final demise of the ‘Human Factor’ (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and early post-WW2 international health institutions – the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO’s Expert Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history and demographic change. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health, social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.