Body Politics: where history, medicine and society collide Kieran Fitzpatrick

In this last episode of the first series of Body Politics, we reflect back on the history that we have come by over the past few months. One of the regular themes thrown up by the series' episodes is what we mean by 'progress' in science and medicine, and how a critical history of science and medicine can have deep, philosophical significance for our present and future senses of how society should be organised.

In conversation with Dr Jacob Moses of Johns Hopkins University, we reflect on what progress means for medical practitioners and patients alike, and how it should be defined as part of our changing ethical sensibilities, and what they represent about broader changes in ethical and moral values, in distinction to better know definitions of progress accompanying technological innovation.

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Between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the beginning of the 1960s, the idea of 'global health' came to be one of the key ways in which powerful, global institutions expressed their visions for how the world should be run. Drugs, poisons and other therapies came to be the materials through which humanity was to be made less prone to its oldest foes: death, disease and hunger. Of these materials, one in particular was spoken about as a particularly wondrous substance for eradicating the insects that caused terrible diseases like malaria and typhus: DDT. Between the war and 1962, DDT was viewed as a drug that embodied the greatest promises of science to improve the world, but then an American writer named Rachel Carson published a book, Silent Spring, which argued that DDT was in fact dangerously toxic to humans and animals alike when ingested in large enough quantities. The story of Carson's book has since become stock for understanding DDT's social, economic and environmental history, but this episode of Body Politics, plots a less well-known version of that history, by following the drug's deployment in British colonies across the African continent. Through a fascinating conversation with Dr Sabine Clark of the University of York, it raises pointed questions about the politics of International Development in the post-war world, and for whose benefit that development was being orchestrated. 

Over the past seventy years, antibiotics have become one of the world's most prominent and powerful technologies for reducing human suffering through infectious diseases. Some historians have even gone as far to describe this period as the 'antibiotic era'. However, in the early twenty-first century, the progressive promises of antibiotics have come under existential threat, through the ability of bacteria to become resistant to them. This problem, known as Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR), has in consequence come to be seen as one of the existential threats to human civilisation in the next few decades, second only to climate change and ecological collapse. How did this troubling transition occur? With "guest" appearances from David Attenborough and Alexander Fleming, and in conversation with one of the world's leading authorities on the history of AMR, the historian Claas Kirchhelle, this episode offers an answer: through the industrial use of antibiotics in agriculture around the world in the decades after the Second World War. 

How do people cope on a day-to-day basis with experiences of infectious diseases?

In this episode of Body Politics, we answer this question with the help of Dr Georgia McWhinney, an historian at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Dr McWhinney is an historian of the First World War (1914-1918), the conflict that defined politics and society for much of the twentieth-century. Her work recovers the strategies that the conflict's soldiers came up with to, if not cure, then contend with debilitating diseases - like typhus and trench foot - that plagued as many as 95% of them as they sat in mud-filled, rat-infested trenches, waiting to face their enemies.

This 'vernacular medicine' as she calls it represented ordinary people living with disease during one of modern history's most chaotic, destructive moments, and the ways in which they attempted to cope with the environment in which they found themselves. 

In the past twelve months, we have become acutely aware of the ways in which diseases are the products of our relationship with the natural world, by way of disease transmission between animals and humans. This process is called zoonosis, and has been identified by some commentators as 'a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century'. However, zoonosis is also a word of the past, whose theories and structure began to formulate 120 years ago, as the world froze in the face of another deadly pandemic: plague.  As we will hear in this episode, with the help of Dr Christos Lynteris of St Andrew's University, this third global pandemic of plague began the process of formulating epidemiological theories of zoonosis, the legacies of which still echo more than a century on. 

"Are you gonna get the vaccine?" In the past few months, this question has probably been asked millions of times in hundreds of languages, in households all over the world. For many of us, answering affirmatively is more than a response to a simple, closed question, but puts us on the "right side" of history. By saying "yes" to vaccines, we also say "yes" to science, truth, the moral high ground, and civilisation itself. In large parts of culture those who answer "no" are often ridiculed, branded mad, decadent and irresponsible in the process. 

This episode, though, should make you reflect on such simple categorisations. What do people actually mean when they resist vaccines? Are they talking about vaccines themselves, or is there some deeper form of expression at play, of sentiments about how they feel as parents, citizens, men, and women? With the help of historian Nadja Durbach, we are going to think with vaccine resistance as it emerged in relation to smallpox in early-nineteenth-century Britain, in the decades after vaccination was first used as a treatment against infectious disease by Edward Jenner. That conversation is about a specific time and place, but has resonance with our own times, and what is at stake - other than science - for regular people when they submit to medical treatment.