Global health and the new world order

What does global health stem from, when is it born and how does it relate to the contemporary world order? In this book, historians and anthropologists tackle these questions by exploring the transnational circulation of drugs, bugs, therapies, biomedical technologies and people in the context of the “neo-liberal turn” in development practices.

The phrase ‘global health’ appears ubiquitously in contemporary medical spheres, from academic research programs to websites of pharmaceutical companies. In its most visible manifestation, global health refers to strategies addressing major epidemics and endemic conditions through philanthropy, and multilateral, private-public partnerships. This book explores the origins of global health, a new regime of health intervention in countries of the global South born around 1990, examining its assemblages of knowledge, practices and policies.The volume proposes an encompassing view of the transition from international public health to global health, bringing together historians and anthropologists to analyse why new modes of “interventions on the life of others” recently appeared and how they blur the classical divides between North and South. The contributors argue that not only does the global health enterprise signal a significant departure from the postwar targets and modes of operations typical of international public health, but that new configurations of action have moved global health beyond concerns with infectious diseases and state-based programs.The book will appeal to academics, students and health professionals interested in new discussions about the transnational circulation of drugs, bugs, therapies, biomedical technologies and people in the context of the "neo-liberal turn" in development practices.

1 Global health and the new world order: introduction – Claire Beaudevin, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Christoph Gradmann, Anne M. Lovell, and Laurent Pordié2 Standardization and localization in tuberculosis control – Nora Engel3 The not so distant past, tuberculosis and the DOTS challenge – Jean-Paul Gaudillière, Christoph Gradmann and Andrew McDowell4 Decolonizing, nationalizing, and globalizing the history of psychiatry: from colonial to cross-cultural psychiatry in Nigeria – Matthew M. Heaton5 ‘Clearing the streets’: enacting human rights in mental health care in Ghana – Ursula Read6 You’ve got the point? Acupuncture and the techno-politics of bodyscape – Wen-Hua Kuo7 Finding the global in the local: constructing population in the search for disease genes – Steve Sturdy8 Rare genetic disease, global health and genomics: the case of R337h in Brazil – Sahra Gibbon9 The World Health Organization’s response to Ebola in historical perspective – Nitsan Chorev10 Epilogue: in search of global health – Didier FassinIndex