The established social critique of compliance was written in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a group of sociologists and anthropologists. Drawing on a humanist perspective, it argued that compliance operated as a form of medical control over patients that ignored their experiences of medications or defined them in terms of professional expectations. In this paper we draw on the theoretical work of Smith and Foucault and on original research on the 'healthwork' of people living with HIV/ AIDS to revise this critique. Our analysis foregrounds the heterogeneity of power relations exercised through contemporary relations of compliance/adherence. We argue that in the contemporary context of HIV/AIDS, compliance/adherence operates as a fundamental discursive ground of people's healthwork and is constitutive of, rather than hostile to, experience and the self. Considered as a technology rather than concept, adherence groups together a host of strategies designed to cultivate a particular relation of self to treatment in ways that do not operate with the uniform force suggested by the early social critique. At the same time, compliance is not simply about liberal forms of self-governance. It is a site where multiple forms of power-biomedical authority, population-based forms of risk governance, and liberal techniques of the self-intersect in relations of tension, negotiation, and support.
This paper counters the tendency to retrospectively viralise the 1918-19 pandemic and to gloss the important historiographical point that, in Britain, such knowledge was in-the-making between 1918 and 1933. It traces the genesis of influenza's virus identity to British efforts in 1918-19 to specify the cause of the pandemic and it examines how, in the 1920s, the British Medical Research Council used the connection between a virus and the pandemic to justify the development of virus research and to make influenza a core problem around which it was organised. It shows that the organisation of medical virus research was inextricably linked to the pandemic before the actual discovery of flu virus in 1933. Recognising that the relationship between the virus and the disease itself has a history demands we rethink the pandemic's medical scientific legacy and the crucial role of virus research in shaping its history.
This chapter outlines the history of the "One Health" concept through a neutral, prospective, evidence-based approach that pays due regard to historical context. It focuses on the constellation of ideas, practices and circumstances that brought human and animal health (and to a lesser extent, the environment) into alignment, the people and institutions involved and the reasons for change over time. The first section analyzes intersections between human and animal health in the pre-modern era. It shows how deeply animals and animal health were embedded within human medicine and the importance of the environment to health ideas and practices. The second section extends from the late 18th-century foundation of the veterinary profession until the turn of the 20th century. It tracks the evolving relationship between the veterinary and medical professions, and how, as scientific ideas and practices changed, new links were forged between humans, animals and the environment. The third section extends this analysis into the 20th century, focusing particularly on the changing status of animals within medical research, and on international efforts to develop comparative medicine and veterinary public health. The conclusion reflects on the importance of these findings for history, and for "One Health" today.
A remarkable feature of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the outpouring of voluntary action, community support and mutual aid across the world. People from all walks of life and living in all conditions have taken to social distancing and isolation, with little protest. As doctors, nurses, health care providers and other essential workers have risked their lives to tend to the sick and dying, neighbours and communities, friends and strangers have joined together to support the most vulnerable. This is not to downplay the darker sides of the pandemicthe harrowing increase in domestic abuse or the structural violence of socioeconomic inequalities, which has meant that (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), the poor, old and marginal have suffered disproportionately. The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated failures to address these deeply entrenched inequalities. But while some have sought to vilify and blame certain countries or groups, COVID-19 has been largely borne peacefully with few collective acts of hatred or violence. As Samuel Cohn argues in this exhaustive global history, epidemics can give rise to social solidarity as much as they can give rise to social divisions and conflicts. This paradox should come as no surprise to historians. Yet, Cohn contends that the historiography of epidemics has relied too heavily on categories of blame and 'othering', and too little on altruism and care, with the consequence that a consensus has formed that assumes that epidemic diseases increase or foster social, ethnic and political tensions. Epidemics is meant to be a challenge and corrective to this consensus. Working comparatively across more than 2500 years, it reexamines how different diseases, from the Plague of Athens to AIDS, sparked different 'socio-psychological' reactions. The temporal and geographical scope is vast. The approach is equally ambitious. Rather than synthesise existing historical work, it surveys a massive collection of digitised archives and, for the nineteenth century onwards, the growing number of digital newspaper collections available to historians. The result is a densely empirical analysis that shows that while some epidemics sparked collective hatred and violence towards specific social groups, a large number did not follow this pattern. Divided into five parts, twenty-five chapters move chronologically from antiquity and the middle ages (Part I), to early modernity (Part II) and then to modernity (Parts III and V), with an epilogue devoted to HIV/AIDS. The sample of diseases analysed is relatively small, with focus primarily on plague, syphilis, yellow fever, cholera and influenza. The rationale for this choice, very briefly outlined in the introduction, is that these gave rise to the most sustained and dramatic collective reactions and allow for comparative analysis across time and place. Few would doubt this claim, but some explanation was needed for why other diseases, which have had an equally global impact on human history, such as tuberculosis and malaria, fail to meet these criteri...
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