Spring 2018 at the Centre for Global Health Histories

It has been a busy start to the year at the Centre for Global Health Histories, with new outputs to celebrate and new colleagues to welcome. We provide a digest below; full particulars on these and all CGHH news and events can be found at www.york.ac.uk/history/global-health-histories/.

New publications

Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya contributed a chapter ‘Global and local histories of medicine: interpretative challenges and future possibilities’ in A Global History of Medicine edited by Mark Jackson.

Dr Alexander Medcalf’s open access article ‘Between art and information: communicating world health, 1948–70’ was published in the Journal of Global History (Volume 13, Issue 1 (2018), pp. 94-120) and is available to view online via Cambridge Core.

Dr Margaret Jones and Chandani Liyanage’s article, ‘Traditional Medicine and Primary Health Care in Sri Lanka: Policy, Perceptions, and Practice’, was published in the Asian Review of World Histories’ website. This is also an open access article available to all to view.

New team members

Dr Rebecca Wright joined CGHH in January as a Research Fellow in Future Health. Her two-year fellowship was awarded by the Centre of Future Health, an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of York (co-funded with the Wellcome Trust) supporting innovative research on future health challenges. Rebecca’s research will examine the intersections between the histories of energy and health.

Deika Mohamed was awarded the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and has joined CGHH as a Visiting Scholar until May 2018. Deika will conduct archival research across Europe while working under the direction of CGHH’s Director Sanjoy Bhattacharya.

New lectures

In January Sanjoy Bhattacharya delivered a lecture ‘History Matters: WHO EMRO and the Worldwide Eradication of Smallpox’ to WHO staff during a visit to the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean. He was subsequently invited to record it for the WHO EMRO YouTube channel and it is now available to view online. The video provides a historical overview of smallpox eradication, and sheds light on various public health, social and political factors which contributed to this landmark global health achievement.

At the end February, Sanjoy also represented CGHH at two events at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a further talk at the Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE). The first event, a public lecture on 27th February, re-visited the worldwide eradication of smallpox, exploring the idea of ethically prepared histories as roadmaps for global health. The second event, on 28th February, took the form of a roundtable with Sanjoy, Ivy Yeh, Michael Stanley-Baker, Park Hyung Wook and Fang Xiaoping of Nanyang Technological University tackling the provocative subject ‘Are Medical History and Humanities Useful?’ At the third event at CARE on the 1st March event Sanjoy delivered a public lecture titled "Repositioning the World's Health: Empires, Democracy and the Making of the World Health Organization".