Migrant clinics and hookworm science: peripheral origins of International Health, 1840-1920

Hookworms Make Us Human: The Microbiome, Eco-immunology, and a Probiotic Turn in Western Health Care

Historians of science have identified an ecological turn underway in immunology, driven by the mapping of the human microbiome and wider environmentalist anxieties. A figure is emerging of the human as a holobiont, composed of microbes and threatened by both microbial excess and microbial absence. Antimicrobial approaches to germ warfare are being supplemented by probiotic approaches to restoring microbial life. This article examines the political ecology of this probiotic turn in Western health care. It focuses on Necator americanus-a species of human hookworm-and its relations with immunologists. The analysis moves from a history of human disentanglement from hookworm, to contemporary anxieties about their absence. It examines the reintroduction of worms for helminthic therapy and explores emerging trajectories for probiotic health care involving the synthesis, modification, and/or restoration of worms and their salutary ecologies. The conclusion differentiates these trajectories and identifies an emerging model of "post-paleo" microbiopolitics.

Private actors, global health and learning the lessons of history

Private business and philanthropic organizations have played a prominent role in the response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the support of global health governance more broadly. While this involvement may appear to be novel or unprecedented, this article argues that this active role for private actors and philanthropies actually mirrors the historical experience of cross-border health governance in the first half of the twentieth century. By examining the experiences, roles and criticisms of the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it is possible to identify potential opportunities for better cooperation between public and private actors in global health governance.

[Frontier, sugarcane and trafficking: slavery, disease and death in Capivari, São Paulo, 1821-1869]

The deaths and diseases of slaves in the São Paulo State sugarcane municipality of Capivari are addressed, associating the causes attributed to these deaths to the social and economic context and characteristics of the local slave communities. The impact of malaria, relating it to the age brackets, the environment created by work on the sugarcane plantations and the evolution of the occupation of the area, initially by expanding frontiers, is emphasized. The relationship between illness and work processes, as well as the post-disembarkation mortality of Africans and the possibility of mortality crises among the sugarcane captives is explored. The results lead to a discussion of the impact of habitat and Atlantic displacement and the difficulty in acclimatizing.

Inventing Caribbean climates: how science, medicine, and tourism changed tropical weather from deadly to healthy

This article examines how four major historical factors--geographical features, social conditions, medicine, and tourism--affected European and North American views of the tropical Caribbean climate from approximately 1750 to 1950. It focuses on the British West Indies, a region barely examined in the historiography of climate, and examines the views of physicians, residents, government officials, travelers, and missionaries. International perceptions of the tropical Caribbean climate shifted markedly over time, from the deadly, disease-ridden environment of colonial depictions in the eighteenth century to one of the world's most iconic climatic paradises, where tourists sought sun-drenched beaches and healing breezes, in the twentieth. This analysis of how environmental conditions, knowledge systems, social relations, politics, and economics shaped scientific and popular understandings of climate contributes to recent studies on the cultural construction of climate. The approach also offers important lessons for present-day discussions of climate change, which often depict climate too narrowly as simply temperature.