ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Socialist Tropical Medicine: Securing the Nation in ‘Fortress Europe’ in the Late Cold War

• In Event: (Re)thinking Histories of Disease in the “Tropics” (I)

English Abstract

Tropical medicine in Romania emerged out of epidemiological concerns about the threat posed by “highly dangerous infectious diseases” considered endemic in the post-colonial world. This specialism was inextricably tied to the socialist state's heightened obsession with the health of the nation. As the interest of the regime in Bucharest toward Africa, Asia and Latin America expanded during the late 1960s, its health care officials agonized about medical perils at the “tropics” either in terms of the well-being of Romanian citizens working in the Global South or with a view to the morbidities of foreign youth studying in Romania. In this context, "the tropics" became an amorphous, pathological space populated by non-white peoples, who were potential carriers of “imported pathologies”. By the late 1970s and during the 1980s, as experts struggled to avoid tropical determinism, the field overlapped with prophylactic population management. This in turn nurtured quasi-eugenic discourses that echoed racialized hierarchies of a world by now disenchanted with decolonial emancipation. I argue that the mixture of epidemiology, parasitology, virology and community medicine facilitated the convergence of Romanian (socialist) tropical medicine with variations of this field in the West. Such East-West confluence will be explored along two overlapping sites of epistemic entanglement: the WHO's Health for All campaign and the European Association of the Institutes of Tropical Medicine.

Author

• Bogdan Cristian Iacob, "Nicolae Iorga" Institute of History (Romanian Academy); Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (Austrian Academy)