The English System is a history of port health and immigration at a critical moment of transformation at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. During the later nineteenth century, British public health officials transformed the medieval quarantine system into a novel ‘English System’ of surveillance to control the introduction of infectious disease. This removed the much maligned hindrances of quarantine to high-speed international commerce and for maritime traffic through Britain’s ports. At the same time, calls were made to restrict the arrival of increasing numbers of European immigrants and transmigrants. This book explores the tensions and transition in the regulation of port health from a paradigm focused on the origin of disease to one which converged on the origin of the diseased.

Diseases do not recognize national borders, and as we are gradually learning, failure to govern health effectively at a global level profoundly affects us all. This book is about how global health governance has evolved to become stronger, more complex, and more important than ever before in history.

A history of the World Health Organization, covering major achievements in its seventy years while also highlighting the organization's internal tensions. This account by three leading historians of medicine examines how well the organization has pursued its aim of everyone, everywhere attaining the highest possible level of health.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 19 papers.

For many residents of Western nations, COVID-19 was the first time they experienced the effects of an uncontrolled epidemic. This is in part due to a series of little-known regulations that have aimed to protect the global north from epidemic threats for the last two centuries, starting with International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 and culminating in the present with the International Health Regulations, which organize epidemic responses through the World Health Organization. Unlike other equity-focused global health initiatives, their mission—to establish "the maximum protections from infectious disease with the minimum effect on trade and traffic"—has remained the same since their founding. Using this as his starting point, Alexandre White reveals the Western capitalist interests, racism and xenophobia, and political power plays underpinning the regulatory efforts that came out of the project to manage the international spread of infectious disease. He examines how these regulations are formatted; how their framers conceive of epidemic spread; and the types of bodies and spaces it is suggested that these regulations map onto. Proposing a modified reinterpretation of Edward Said's concept of orientalism, White invites us to consider "epidemic orientalism" as a framework within which to explore the imperial and colonial roots of modern epidemic disease control.