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Global Health: Historical Sources and Problems

Module description

Around the turn of the Twenty-First Century, ‘global health’ emerged as an academic discipline and organisational strategy which aims to prevent the spread of disease worldwide, and to promote health in the ‘global south’. However, global health is not new, but has built upon much older histories of colonial medicine and international health. Using a wide range of sources, this module analyses the relationship between global health and major social, economic and political processes and ideologies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century—particularly imperialism, modernisation, development, and globalisation. This module is suitable for interdisciplinary pathways.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The aims of this module are to:

• Introduce you to key ideas, institutions and interventions in the interrelated histories global health, international health and colonial medicine
• Introduce you to the rich body of sources available for analysing and interpreting this history. Through close analysis of a diverse range of sources, students will critically assess global health projects in their social and political contexts, and examine their relationship to broader projects of imperialism, modernisation, development and globalisation.
• Give you the opportunity to conduct your own research into the source material, to consider its utility and limitations, and use it to explore particular topics and themes. In doing this, the module will help you develop skills in source analysis and research that will provide a foundation for future historical work.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Understand and assess the main developments in the history of global health
• 2. Work critically with a range of written and visual sources relating to the topic

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Identify the problems of using historical sources, e.g. utility, limitations, etc, and compare the validity of different types of sources
• 4. Present work orally, respond to questions orally, and think quickly of questions to ask other students

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Conduct independent study and group work, including the presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning
• 6. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment
• 7. Work with others in a team and to interact effectively with the tutor and the wider group
• 8. Write to a very tight word-length

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Disease
• Medicine and empire
• Health and transnational organisations
• International health philanthropy
• Health and postcolonial governance
• Health, international development and the Cold War
• Disease eradication campaigns
• Population control and family planning
• The shift from ‘international health’ to ‘global health.’

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading:

• Sunil S. Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930-65 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
• David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1993)
• Anne-Emanuelle Birn, 'The stages of international (global) health: Histories of success or successes of history?', Global Public Health, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2009), pp. 50-68.
• Theodore M. Brown, Marcos Cueto, and Elizabeth Fee, ‘The World Health Organization and the Transition from “International” to “Global” Public Health’, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 96, No. 1 (2006), pp. 62-72
• Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (eds.), Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997)
• Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Arthur Kleinman, and Matthew Basilico (eds.), Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2013)
• Randall M. Packard, A History of Global Health: Interventions Into the Lives of Other Peoples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
• Paul Weindling (ed.), International Health Organizations and Movements, 1918-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE:
• Global Health Chronicles, http://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/
• Rockefeller Foundation 100 Years documents: http://rockefeller100.org/exhibits/show/health
• Wellcome Images: http://wellcomeimages.org/ 
• World Bank elibrary: http://elibrary.worldbank.org/

Key words search

Britain, Modern, Race, Immigration, Riots, Racism, ‘Britishness’