GLOBAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE PAPER

by Mark Jackson

In recent decades, there has been considerable interest in writing histories of medicine that capture local, regional, and global dimensions of health and health care in the same frame. Exploring changing patterns of disease and different systems of medicine across continents and countries, A Global History of Medicine provides a rich introduction to this emergent field. This book contains revised chapters from The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine with a new introduction and updated reading lists.The introductory chapter addresses the challenges of writing the history of medicine across space and time and suggests ways in which tracing the entangled histories of the patchworks of practice that have constituted medicine allow us to understand how healing traditions are always plural, permeable, and shaped by power and privilege. Written by scholars from around the world and accompanied by suggestions for further reading, individual chapters explore historical
developments in health, medicine, and disease in China, the Islamic World, North and Latin America, Africa, South-east Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. The final chapter focuses on smallpox eradication and reflects on the sources and methods necessary to integrate local and global dimensions of medicine more effectively. Collectively, the contributions to A Global History of Medicine will not only be invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking to expand their knowledge of health and medicine across time, but will also provide a constructive theoretical and empirical platform for future scholarship.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 4, 2018

About the author

Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments and Health at the University of Exeter. After qualifying in immunology in 1982 and medicine in 1985, he pursued research on the social history of infanticide and the history of `feeble-mindedness’ at the Universities of Leeds and Manchester. More recently, he has been researching and writing on the history of allergies and stress in the modern world, from an international perspective. His major publications include New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England (1996), The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain (2000), Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (2006), Asthma: The Biography (2009), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (ed., 2011), The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (2013), The History of Medicine: A Beginners Guide (2014, shortlisted for the Dingle Prize), Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945-85 (ed., 2015), and The Routledge History of Disease (ed., 2016). He is currently writing a cultural history of the midlife crisis and health in middle age.

He has a strong interest in developing the undergraduate medical curriculum, creating opportunities for wider public engagement activities, and collaborating with health practitioners and policy-makers to enable health and well-being. He was Senior Academic Adviser (Medical Humanities) to the Wellcome Trust (2013-16), has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine and Research Resources Funding Committees, (2003-13), and was a member of the History sub-panel for REF 2014. He is Chair of the WHO Europe Expert Advisory Group on the Cultural Contexts of Health and a member of the WHO European Advisory Committee on Health Research.