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 o...

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 eradicatin...

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), ha...

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 debi...

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...

"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, bra...