Coming ‘Home’ to (post)Colonial Medicine: Treating Tropical Bodies in Post-War Britain

Contested Disability: Sickle Cell Disease

The world's first "molecular disease," sickle cell disease (SCD) has captivated the medical community's attention as a multisystem blood disorder linked to abnormalities in one molecule: hemoglobin. While the molecular model of SCD has led to advances in medical management, its reductionism obfuscates the sociopolitical dimensions of the condition, affording little attention to the racialized, gendered, classed, and disabling disparities faced by people with SCD. Consequently, SCD is frequently contested as a disability-opportunities to support people with SCD in everyday challenges escape many healthcare providers. These trends speak to the legacy of anti-Black racism in the Global North, which deeply entwines disability with racialized boundaries of citizenship and broader debates about "deservingness" of welfare. To address these gaps, this article delineates the medical and social models of disability as well as anti-Black racism to explore how social workers can embed human rights for people with SCD in everyday practice. This article is contextualized in Ontario, Canada, a province that recently launched a quality standard, Sickle Cell Disease: Care for People of All Ages.

Nursing Experts, Hygienic Modernity, and Nation Building: The Case of Nursing in Ethiopia in the Post-Colonial Era

This is a tale in three parts. It begins with an exploration of the story of Princess Tsahai, daughter of Haile Selassie, and the highly successful British campaign led by suffragette E. Sylvia Pankhurst to bring British-style nursing and medicine to Ethiopia in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, it examines the role of foreign women, most notably Swedish missionary nurses, in building health services and nursing capacity in the country. Finally, it examines the way in which nursing brought together gendered notions of expertise and geopolitical pressures to redefine expectations for Ethiopian women as citizens of the new nation-state.

Harnessing the Power of Difference: Colonialism and British Chronic Disease Research, 1940-1975

Recent studies of post-war chronic disease epidemiology have generally focused on the histories of research in the USA and UK. Using the archival records of a major British funding body, the Colonial Medical Research Committee and its successor the Tropical Medical Research Board, this article demonstrates the advantages of bringing a post-colonial analytic to this historiography. It highlights how the administrative and medical interests in population difference at the centre of the new epidemiology came to map onto political apparatus initially created to know, reform and govern colonial subjects. Although detached from imperial aims, British medical scientists nonetheless attached value to colonial populations on the basis of British benefit and turned various sites into laboratories to extract it. This relationship did not die with the end of imperial rule. British scientists continued to pursue chronic disease epidemiology in former colonies well into the post-war period, informing debates about Britain's own public health concerns.

What is "colonial" about medieval colonial medicine? Iberian health in global context

Colonial medicine is a thriving field of study in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine. Medicine can be used as a lens to view colonialism in action and as a way to critique colonialism. This article argues that key debates and ideas from that modern field can fruitfully be applied to the Middle Ages, especially for the early empires of Spain and Portugal (mid-fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). The article identifies key modern debates, explores approaches to colonization and colonialism in the Middle Ages and discusses how medieval and modern medicine and healthcare could be compared using colonial and postcolonial discourses. The article ends with three case studies of healthcare encounters in Madeira, Granada and Hispaniola at the end of the fifteenth century.