Picturing health using tropical medicine (20th and 21th centuries
The Symposium here proposed deals with the history of
tropical medicine from the point of view of the social, political and environmental determinants
of diseases now
considered “neglected”. Illustrations on these diseases, the
people who suffer from them and the people who study and confront them require
cross perspectives combining not only disciplines such as entomology,
parasitology, ecology, geography etc., but also visual and written testimonies
and physical devices or tools used for the study and
representation of natural, social and medical phenomena.
Conventional narratives about the history of tropical
medicine emphasize the North Atlantic axis, in other words, contributions
pertaining mainly to Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States. The
Symposium hopes to stress the importance of South-South interactions or what
nowadays is called the Global South, still underestimated in narratives that
consider countries of the northern hemisphere as “centres” of knowledge
production that ‘irradiate’ to other parts of the globe.
Presentations must show clearly how these narratives
may be recovered through scientific, medical and other artefacts
that depicts perceptions of patients, diseases, their vectors,
parasites and environments and their social and political meanings in different
historical and geographical contexts.
We invite potential contributors to show how
photographs, scientific publications, medical records and graphs, advertising
and teaching materials, posters, travel manuals, political, scientific and
medical discourses were used in different historical, geographical and cultural
contexts to illustrate neglected diseases.
Literature
cited:
Hall J, Ross E. Malaria: The Battle against a
Microscopic Killer. Glasgow, UK: Evimalar; 2012.
A Portrait of Diseases: Photographs from a Hospital in South Africa (Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum, 2003).
Susan M. Squier,
Parasites! Graphic Exploration of Tropical Disease Drug Development ,
AMA J Ethics. 2018;20(2):167-175. doi: 10.1001/journalofethics.2018.
The symposium will be divided into sessions covering
specific topics with papers of ca. 20 minutes. Please send your proposal
with the following information.
Deadline – 13 December 2019
1. Title
2. Author(s) (full name(s), academic title, institution, address,
email and a short biographical note of max.150 words). In case of
multiple authors the first author should be the presenting and
corresponding author.
3. Abstract (max. 300 words, including possible references)
4. Keywords (3)
2. Author(s) (full name(s), academic title, institution, address,
email and a short biographical note of max.150 words). In case of
multiple authors the first author should be the presenting and
corresponding author.
3. Abstract (max. 300 words, including possible references)
4. Keywords (3)
Symposium proposal in
preparation for the ESHS 2020 bi-annual meeting in Bologna