Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine

Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine

Edited by Warwick Anderson, Anne Kveim Lie and Jeremy A. Greene

The book includes separate chapters by him and Hans Pols FAHA FASSA FRSN. This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new and urgent politics of social medicine. According to Arthur Kleinman (Harvard): ‘A step forward in imagining a counter-biomedicine that can better connect social suffering and healing with interpretive social science, post-colonial imaginings, and some of the more serious problems of the world. Impressive!’