New Books In Public Health

Elisheva A. Perelman's new book American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan (Hong Kong University Press, 2020) examines the consequences of Japan’s decision not to tackle the tuberculosis epidemic that ravaged the country during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth. TB was a plague of epic proportions in industrializing Japan, particularly affecting young women workers in the new textile factories. These marginalized laborers, many from rural villages, were not a priority for Japan’s first modern administrations, who focused their energies elsewhere and left the welfare of tuberculosis patients to the private sector. The opening left by this choice was filled by American evangelicals, who saw an opportunity to advance their missionary work in Japan.Perelman identifies a kind of twinned moral entrepreneurship, arguing that a tacit agreement was hammered out between the two sides, with the government accepting the evangelical groups’ assistance with this public health emergency in exchange for noninterference in their efforts to spread Christianity. The history of TB in Japan is well studied and understood, but American Evangelists and Tuberculosis in Modern Japan breathes new life into this old story by its attention to different actors and dynamics. It will be of interest not only to scholars of Japanese and East Asian history and culture, but also to historians of science, medicine and public health, and Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Covid-19 podcasts, Silja Keva talks to Kamila Szczepanska and Yoko Demelius about the impacts of the pandemic in Japan. While the state of emergency has now been lifted, the societal impacts of the pandemic are surfacing: gender inequalities and the vulnerability of homeless and illegal immigrants have been amplified. Tensions between municipal and national administration emerged in a lack of an overall strategy to handle the pandemic. In the time of crisis local level actors have stepped up to present much-needed leadership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Modern science uses the “randomized controlled trial”—whereby people are randomly allocated either the drug or a placebo—as a gold standard to find out whether a newly discovered drug works.In this podcast, Dr. Martin Edwards, a general practitioner and retired clinician affiliated to the University of London, discusses the British Medical Research Council’s exploitation of the term “controlled” to establish “controlled trials” as the gold standard for therapeutic evaluation. His discussion is an extension of his paper “Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918-48,” which is published in Brill’s Clio Medica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald F. Stevens offers us a portrait of early republican life in his new book, Mexico in the Time of Cholera, published in 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press. Although Stevens uses the 1833 Cholera epidemic that devastated independent Mexico as his his point of departure, this is not primarily a medical history.Beginning with the suggestion of a contemporary observer that the epidemic put Mexicans on their best, or at least most religiously fervent behavior, Stevens asks how we might be able to measure everyday piety during a time of transition and crisis. His answer comes from following archival trails within parish records, novels, and memoirs and offers readers a glimpse of intimate urban life. In so doing, his book brings to life the day to day practices of Mexicans from birth and naming practices to death and burial norms and shows a country coming to terms with its independence. Students and scholars alike will enjoy following vibrant historical figures like fifteen-year-old Concha, navigating potential suitors with the help of parents and priests as well as unraveling the mystery of why a US-born bootmaker was murdered in Mexico City during a religious progression.Donald Stevens is an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University and an assistant editor for the journal the Americas. He is the author of Origins of Instability in Early Republican Mexico by Duke University Press and editor of, Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies.Elena McGrath is Assistant Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady. She is a historian of 20th century Bolivia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we now know, epidemics and pandemics are not new phenomena. In her new book The Yellow Demon of Fever: Fighting Disease in the 19th-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press, 2020), Manuel Barcia offers a striking rendition of the diseases that swept through the illegal slave trade Atlantic World. In fact, Barcia argues that the history of disease and the story of continuing traffic in enslaved people despite the abolition of the slave trade are processes that must be understood together. Barcia demonstrates that in the 19th century Atlantic, quarantines were politicized, sworn enemies were forced to work together to combat disease, and the medical expertise of enslaved people often prevailed despite efforts to silence or ignore it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has received unprecedented media coverage in the past 3 months. A large part of this coverage includes comparisons of the ongoing crisis to some major crises of the past, including the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003. In a new study titled “When the Analogy Breaks: Historical References in Flemish News Media at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic” published in Brill’s Journal of Applied History, Dr. Bram De Ridder from KU Leuven, Belgium, analyzes how three Flemish media outlets covered the crisis recently and how their misplaced historical analogies could affect public perception, causing a problem in dealing with the current pandemic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the first of our COVID-19 podcasts, Lauri Paltemaa joins Outi Luova for a conversation on China's efforts to manage the COVID-19 epidemic, which he argues come straight from socialist China’s disaster management campaign playbook. Maoist era methods have simply been upgraded using the latest surveillance and communication technologies. Lauri Paltemaa discusses why this legacy could be very worrisome if China faces a second wave of the epidemic.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 27, David D. Kirkpatrick reported in the N. Y. Times that Oxford’s Jenner Center is close to starting human trials on a potential Covid-19 vaccine. According to Kirkpatrick, “ethics rules, as a general principle, forbid seeking to infect human test participants with a serious disease. That means the only way to prove that … Continue reading "30 In Focus: Nir Eyal on (the deontology of) “Challenge Testing” a Covid Vaccine" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard Friedman's new book Ultimate Price: The Value We Place on Life (University of California Press, 2020) should be required reading for anyone sitting down to watch the evening news. The Covid-19 crisis is, unfortunately, a new broad-based instance in the valuation of human life. And I do mean value: in terms of cash dollars. Ultimate Price covers the ways that companies, courts, nations, and individuals have come to put a price tag on individual existence. While the book was written prior to the current situation, it provides an excellent starting point to understand what we are observing as governments, companies, healthcare providers, and individuals make life-and-death decisions.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s when such an event was widely anticipated by experts. Examining how experts in the United States framed a catastrophe that has not happened yet, the book trains a lens on the many generative ways in which the absence of a disease made preparedness a permanent project. Drawing on fieldwork among scientists and public health professionals in New York City, the book investigates how experts, government actors and institutions co-produced pandemic prophecies that were made meaningful to communities on the ground through the framework of catastrophe. Centered on the question how to engage a disease such as influenza in anticipation of potential crisis, this monograph analyses the infelicities of failure and the limits of planning. The pandemic - past, present and future – is arguably always with us, even in its absence.In this episode, we discuss the pandemic when it was a ‘perhaps’, unpack the blurring of reason and faith among expert interlocutors and draw out lessons on preparedness and its paradoxes for the present global coronavirus crisis.Carlo Caduff is a Reader in the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College, London.Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University. Singapore. You can find her website here or on Twitter @laurelinarien Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices