A Global History of Medicine

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. 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.

Mark Jackson is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. He has served as Chair of the Wellcome Trust History of Medicine and Research Resources funding committees, as Senior Academic Advisor (Medical Humanities) to the Wellcome Trust, and as a member of the History sub-panel for REF 2014. He has taught modules in the history of medicine and the history and philosophy of science for over thirty years at undergraduate and postgraduate levels to both medical and history students, and has been involved in teaching medical history to GCSE and A level students. His books include The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (2011), The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability (2012), Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945-85 (ed., 2015), and The Routledge History of Disease (ed., 2016). He is currently writing a book on the history of the midlife crisis.

- 1: Mark Jackson: One world, one health? Towards a global history of medicine - 2: Vivienne Lo and Michael Stanley-Baker: Chinese medicine - 3: Harold J. Cook: Medicine in Western Europe - 4: Hormoz Ebrahimnejad: Medicine in Islam and Islamic medicine - 5: Marius Turda: History of medicine in Eastern Europe, including Russia - 6: Anne-Emanuelle Birn: Public health and medicine in Latin America - 7: Edmund Ramsden: Science and medicine in the United States of America - 8: Mark Harrison: Medicine and colonialism in South Asia since 1500 - 9: Lyn Schumaker: African studies and the history of medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa - 10: Linda Bryder: History of medicine in Australia and New Zealand - 11: Sanjoy Bhattacharya: Global and local histories of medicine: interpretative challenges and future possiblities