Health, Power, and Poverty

 Fall 2021. HIST-UA 473.001(6965). Tuesday 2:00-4:45, KJCC 717

David Ludden: office hours Wed 12-2pm, 526 KJCC (53 Wash. Sq. South)

HERE is link to Full Syllabus PDF File, updated Dec 10, 2021,

ALL updates will be here on the webpage

Initial Student Research Paper Prospectus Due in the week of October 12.

Reading and Writing:

You DO NOT need to read everything, but prioritize reading according to the order of listings, each week, and starting next week, put a 1-page response paper indicating what you have read and how you find it useful into your GoogleDoc Student folder. Additional Readings are in our GoogleDocs Readings Folder. For more readings to develop your research, search GoogleScholar and and NYU Ebooks.)

Initial Student Research Paper Prospectus Due in the week of October 12. FINAL PAPERS due Monday 20 December, 5PM, in student Google Folders. No late papers will be accepted.

Week 1. Sept 7. Overview of Course and Major Theme: Health and Inequity

Read: Oxfam Report: “Today’s World on the Brink of Famine.” 

Study Video: David Ludden, “Global Pandemic in National Territory.” 

in class: Getting Started with research: Keywords. Bobst Ebrary. Google scholar. E-data. JSTOR. Ref Librarians.

Week 2. Sept 14.  Power/Knowledge in Medical Regimes.

In class presentation: Global Pandemic in National Territory, focusing on politics as public health, beginning with the work of Rudolph Virchow. Here is a video lecture based on this PPT. it remains live for 90 days. 

Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power : Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press, 2004, to p.133.

J.N.Hays and J. Hays. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. Rutgers University Press, 2009, Chapter 9, “Disease, Medicine, and Western Imperialism,” pp 179-213, and Chapter 12, “Disease and Power,” pp. 283-314.

Martin S. Pernick, “Eugenics and Public Health in American History,” American Journal of Public Health, 87, 1997, 1767-72.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics.

Veena Sriram, et al, “10 best resources on power in health policy and systems in low- and middle-income countries,” Health Policy and Planning, 33, 4, 2018, 611–621. 

Shobana Shankar, “What the US could learn about vaccination from Nigeria,” The Conversation, June 6, 2019.

NCBI studies of Power Relations, Sexual Abuse in Medicine; on Racial Disparities in Health Care. 

David Cross: Why America Sucks at Everything – especially health .. and Jay S. Kaufman, “Science Alone Can’t Heal a Sick Society,” NYTimes, Sept 12, 2021.

JP Mackenbach, “Politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale: reflections on public health’s biggest idea,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health,  3 December 2008, 181-184. (Good Wikipedia on Rudolph Virchow)

Melbourne Tapper. In the blood: sickle cell anemia and the politics of race. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 (hardback only: Bobst Main Collection Offsite RA645.S53 T37 1999)

Anis Chauduri and Jomo Sundaram, “ Privatized Healthcare Worsens Pandemic.” 

IDEAS on Pandemic and capitalism

The Lancet: “Fatal Police Violence by race and state in the USA, 1980-2019…” The Lancet 2021, 398, 1239-55. (PDF online)

Gloria Kim, “Pathogenic Nation-Making: Media Ecologies and American nationhood Under the Shadow of Viral Emergence,” Configurations, 24, 4, 2016, 441-470. (PDF)

Empire and Colonialism

The British Empire as a Medical Regime 

Robert Kramm, Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952, University of California Press, 2017. 

Mari K. Webel, The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920, Ohio University Press, 2019.

Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowits, “Explaining the Mortality Decline in the Eighteenth century British Slave Trade,” The Economic History Review, New series, 53, 2, 2000, 262-83.

Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism. Yale University Press, 1997.

Howard Waitzkin and Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar, “Imperialism’s Health Component,” Monthly Review, July 1, 2015.

Chigudu, “An ironic guide to colonialism in global health,” The Lancet, 397, 1028, 2021, 1874-5.

Michael Zeheter, Epidemics, Empire, and Environments: Cholera in Madras and Quebec City, 1818-1910, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015, at least 98-198, 241-258.

M. Turshen, “The impact of colonialism on health and health services in Tanzania,” International Journal of Health Services, 1977, 7, 1, 7-35. 

S. Marks, “What is colonial about colonial medicine? And what has happened to imperialism and health?” Social History of Medicine, 10,2, 1997. 205-19.

Nigel C. Gibson and Roberto Beneduce. Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017. .

Helen Tilley, “Medicine, Empires, and Ethics in Colonial Africa,”  AMA Journal of Ethics, 2016, 18, 7, 743-753. doi: 10.1001/journalofethics.2016.18.7.mhst1-1607.Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health New York: Palgrave, 2006

John Farley, Brock Chisholm, the World Health Organization, and the Cold War Vancouver: UBC Press , 2008.

Foucault

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, New York: Tavistock Publications, 1973.

Reassessing Foucault: power, medicine and the body, edited by Colin Jones and Roy Porter. New York: Routledge, 1998                 

Week 3. Sept 21. Inequality: Health, Wealth, Poverty, Entitlement

Aggregate Historical Statistics. Gapminder Videos: ”200 Years that changed the world.”

Poverty/Health Basics. Key Facts: Poverty and Poor Health. … Definitions of Poverty… Defining Health? WHO The Solid Facts, Social Determinants of Health. 33pp. 2003.

Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp.1-51.

The Society and Population Health Reader, Volume 1, Income Inequality and Health, Ichiro Kawachi, Bruce P. Kennedy, and Richard G. Wilkinson, The New Press, New York, 1999, Part 1, The Relative Income Hypothesis, pp. 3-46.

John Harris, “Bringing Politics Back into Poverty Analysis,” and S.R.Osmani, “When Endowments and Opportunities Don’t Match: Understanding Chronic Poverty, in Poverty Dynamics : Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Tony Addison, David Hulme, and Ravi Kanbur, Oxford University Press, 2009, Chapters 9&11, pp.205-224, 247-266.

The Times of India Sept 19, 2020. “Indian Farm Bills Undermine food security – entitlements.”

Laurie Shrage, “Race, Health Disparities, Incarceration, and Structural Inequality,” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, Jan 2017.

Siddiqi Osmani and Amartya Sen, “The hidden penalties of gender inequalilty: fetal origins of ill-health,” Economics and Human Biology, 1, 2003, 105-121. 

PLoS Medicine Research on Mortality and Life-Expectancy Inequality in the US.

WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health. Global Health Inequity.

Gary W. Evans and Elyse Kantrowitz, “Socioeconomic Status and Health: The Potential Role of Environmental Risk Exposure,” Annual Review of Public Health, 2002, 23, 303-31

Week 4. Sept 28. Inequality: Malnutrition, Famine, and Food Insecurity

Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp.52-166; and Sugata Bose, “Starvation amidst plenty: The making of famine in Bengal, Honan and Tonkin, 1942-1945,” Modern Asian Studies, 24, 4, 1990, 699-727.

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. E-book, London: Verso, 2002. (especially Part IV, “The Political Ecology of Famine,” 277-395)

Alker and E.L.Fox, “Why Marginalization, not Vulnerability, Can best identify people in need of special medical and nutrition care.” AMA Journal of Ethics. 2018, 20: E941-947

Bina Agarwal, “Social security and the family: Coping with seasonality and calamity in rural India,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 17, 3, 1990, 341-412.

Christopher G. Locke and Fredoun Z. Amadi-Esfahani, “Famine Analysis: A Study of Entitlements in Sudan, 1984-1985,”  Economic Development and Social Change, 41, 2, 1993, 363-376.

Week 5. Oct 5. Epidemic/Endemic Disease: Malaria

“Pathocenosis: A Holistic Approach to Disease Ecology,” by Jean-Pau Gonzalez, et al EcoHealth, 7, 237-240, 2010

James L. A. Webb, Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria. Cambridge University Press, 2008. (190pp)

Ka-Chi Yip, Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History. Hong Kong University Press, 2009.

Robert Sallares, Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy. Oxford University Press, 2002.

George Comstock, “Variability of Tuberculosis Trends in a Time of Resurgence,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, 19, 6, 1994, 1015-1022

Week 6. Oct 12 – No class today. “Legislative Monday.” Classes meet on Monday Schedule.

Initial Research Prospectus due this week.

Week 7. Oct 19. Pandemics

William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Random House, 1998.

James L. A. Webb, “Globalization of disease, 1300 to 1900,” in The Cambridge World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Cambridge University Press, 2015. pp 54-75.

Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

NCBI Review of Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. New York and London: OR Books. 205 pp (a book available only in print)

Jeff Tollefson, “Why deforestation makes pandemics more likely,” Nature, 584, 13 August 2020 (online PDF)

Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events: Understanding the Contributions to Infectious Disease Emergence: Workshop Summary. Institute of Medicine (US) Forum on Microbial Threats. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2008.

Attila Murányi and Bálint Varga, “Relationship Between the COVID-19 Pandemic and Ecological, Economic, and Social Conditions,” Frontiers of  Public Health, 23 July 2021. (online PDF)

Nancy Tomes, “’Destroyer and Teacher”: Managing the Masses During the 1918-1919 Flu Pandemic.” Public Health Reports, 2010, 125, 48-62.

WHO official says Booster shots “make a mockery of vaccine equity. NYT 20 Aug21

Oxfam report: “The Inequality Virus”

India Today: “How Covid-19 crisis has exposed India’s growing wealth gap”

Susan Sell, “What COVID-19 Reveals about Twenty-first Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity,” Development 63, 2020,150–156.

Paul Farmer, “Ebola, Spanish Flu and the Memory of disease,“ Critical Inquiry, 46, 2019, 56-71.

Alex de Waal, “New Pathogen, Old Politics.” We should be wary of simplistic uses of history, but we can learn from the logic of social responses. Boston Review, Apr 3, 2020

Video (36min): Ludden, “Global Pandemic in National Territory.” Oct 5, 2020

Google Top Glove pandemic for Malaysia migrant labor infections here is NYT

Primary sources: The Natural History and Epidemiology of Cholera: Being the Annual Oration of the Medical Society of London, May 7, 1888 Sir Joseph Fayrer, RCP Library, 1888. … New York Times Report on Cholera in NYC 1832.

Online Resources: Pandemic Studies Webpage. Visualizing the history of pandemics. GOOGLE: “ecology and pandemics”

Week 8. Oct 26. War

India and World War I : A Centennial Assessment. Edited by Roger Long and Ian Talbot Taylor and Francis, 2018. Chapter 6, Santanu Das “’Subalterns at Mesopotamia: battle, sierge, and captivity,” pp.157-172, and Chapter 7, Rachel Constance, “In the shadows: contextualilzing cholera outbreaks in the Indian Army during the Great War,” pp.173-188

Pat Walsh, “Who Remembers the Persians? ,” Irish Foreign Affairs, 2004. A review of The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-1919 by Mohammad Gholi Majd, University Press of America: (Review). Second Edition, 2013,

Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War : The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, Basic Books, 2010.

War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lutz, Catherine, and Andrea Mazzarino, editors. Vol. 4, NYU Press, 2019.  

Tim Dyson, “Child Mortality in Iraq since 1990,” Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 21, 2006, 4487-96.

Week 9. Nov 2 — Inequality: Exclusion, Displacement, Migration, Violence.

Invisible: The Rohingyas, the crisis, the people and their health

Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840–2010, edited by Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne, New York:Routedge, 2011.

James K. Boyce, “Inequality is bad for your health.” DifferenTakes, Hampshire College.

Stephen Devereaux, “Sen’s Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-critiques.” Oxford Development Studies, 29, 3, 2001, 245-263.

Gary Evans and Elyse Kantrowitz,” Socioeconomic Status and Health: The Potential Role of Environmental Risk Exposure,” AnnRev Public Health 2002, 23, 303-31.

Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Every Thirty Minutes: Farmer Suicides, Human Right, and the Agrarian Crisis in India.  New York University, 2011.

WHO Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women. 2005

International Journal for Equity in Health … 2003: 2, 4. “Poverty and Inequity in the Era of Globalization: Our Need to Change and to Re-conceptualize”

Stuart Gillespie, Struggle for Health: A Case Study of Malnutrition and Ill-Health among South Indian Tribals, Concept Publishing, New Delhi, 1993, Chapter 4, “Nutritional and Health Outcomes, pp.73-100.

Midterm grades due

Week 10. Nov 9. Student Research Discussion

Annie Guo. Pathocenosis. Reading: “Pathocenosis: A Holistic Approach to Disease Ecology,” by Jean-Paul Gonzalez, et al EcoHealth, 7, 237-240, 2010.

Elaine Kelley. Lead Paint Poisoning. Reading: Christian Warren, “Toxic Purity: The Progressive Era Origins of America’s Lead Paint Poisoning Epidemic,” The Business History Review , 73, 4,  1999, 705-736.

Hannah Casaretti. Food Insecurity. Possible readings, on “Food Insecurity and Health Outcomes”, and “Malnutrition and Health Inequality.”

Week 11. Nov 16. Student Research Discussion

Jaeven Aylor. Eugenics. Possible reading: “Introduction: Eugenics and the Modern World,” by Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (Edited by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine)

K.C.Pereida. Brazil Northeast AIDS and Covid 19. Reading: Ligea Kerr, et al,“COVID-19 in Northeast Brazil: achievements and limitations in the responses of the state governments.” (background, “The Invention of the Northeast.” 

Melisha Esson. Refugee Health. Possible Reading: Patrick Kingsley, on the Moria refugee camp in Greece, New York Times. (Here is a CDC site on refugee health.)

Week 12. Nov 23. Student Research Discussion

Ty Wickham. Incarceration and Health. Possible reading: Todd R. Clear, “Impact of Incarceration on Community Public Safety and Public Health,” in Public Health Behind Bars, pp. 13-24.

Veer Arya. How Stories Invent Solutions. Here is a sample reading on the story that fear of overpopulation … and here is related solution for feeding that population.

Sarah Prilutsky. Vaccination. Reading C Holmberg, et al The Politics of Vaccination: A Global History. Manchester University Press, 2017.

Week 13. Nov 30. Draft Research Paper Workshop

Annie, Elaine, Hannah, 

Week 14. Dec 7. Draft Research Paper Workshop

Jaeven, Casey, Melisha

Week 15. Dec 14.  Draft Research Paper Workshop.

Ty, Veer, Sarah

Papers Due Monday 20 December, 5PM, in student Google Folders. No late papers will be accepted.