ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

(Re)thinking Histories of Disease in the “Tropics” (II)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This Symposium aims to reflect on new topics and innovative approaches in the historiography of so-called “tropical diseases”. As the history of health interventions during the twentieth century increasingly overlaps with environmental history and the history of biomedicine, we aim to include contributions that go beyond the usual actors and topics of colonial tropical medicine. Openness to new methodological approaches, types of sources, analytical categories from the history of science, diplomacy, and development, and the inclusion of alternative timelines complicate narratives of emergence, neglect, racial hierarchies, “tropicality”, legacies, and unexpected relations between human and non-human actors.
The contributions in this three-part Symposium include perspectives on how tropical diseases were framed, understood, and managed in a variety of geographies and political regimes, showcasing local variations but also transnational networks that brought together locations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
The symposium will comprise three panels. The first panel interrogates the categories of “the tropics” and “neglect”, and explores how tropicality was constructed for specific social, political, and economic purposes. The second panel explores how biomedical technologies shaped and racialized “tropical” populations, even as they were subject to socioeconomic critiques. The third panel uses dengue, a prototypical “neglected tropical disease”, to explore how networks and innovations within the developing world were fundamental to the creation of global health knowledge.
Thus, the symposium highlights the place from which and about which histories of tropical diseases are written, and addresses how tropical diseases construct ontologies, cartographies, and biomedical, epidemiological, and environmental knowledge.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

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

Individual Presentations

• The politics of immunity in 20th century malaria interventions: a Soviet perspective - Marek Robert Eby, University of Leeds

• Tropical diseases and biomedicine’s mundane technologies - Edna Suárez-Díaz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

• Immunology in the Tropics: Malnutrition, Infection, and Immunodeficiency - Anin Luo, Princeton University

Session Organizers

• Edna Suárez-Díaz, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

• Timothy Sim, University of Cambridge