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Session Submission Type: Panel
This panel explores how state officials, doctors, and ordinary citizens in East Central Europe enacted moral visions and addressed moral questions through medicine. Nicole Albrecht’s paper examines the moral and ideological dilemmas of Andrija Štampar, who successfully adapted his interwar vision of decentralized health governance to the changed political conditions of postwar Yugoslavia. Mira Markham traces the shift in Czechoslovak local officials’ treatment of problem drinkers over the decade following the Second World War from moral condemnation to medicalization, identifying a broader political transformation from people’s democracy to welfare dictatorship. Anastassiya Schacht’s contribution discusses how international scandals over the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union allowed Central European psychiatrists to emerge as key actors in transnational expert networks. Finally, Julia Mead’s paper analyzes how the prescription of sedatives and sleeping pills in Czechoslovakia during the late socialist period reinforced traditional ideas of proper female behavior and morality. By bringing together local, global, top-down, and bottom-up perspectives, this panel sheds new light on issues of health and medicine in East Central Europe under Communist rule – and, more broadly, on the place of scientific expertise in state socialist societies.
Choice or Duty?: Andrija Štampar and Working Under State Socialism - Nicole Albrecht, Georgetown U
We’re Informed You’ve Become A Notorious Drunkard: Alcohol and Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1954 - Mira Markham, University of Michigan, Center for Emerging Democracies
Matka’s Little Helper: Psychiatric Pharmaceuticals under Socialism - Julia Mead, Harvard U