Medical Humanities Blog

On Inequalities and Disparities

I have a guest post on the subject over at the very fine Inequalities blog.  Here's the opening paragraph:

The terms we use to describe inequality are important.  They’re important because there are different perspectives about (1) what terms should be used for (2) which referents (3) in which circumstances, and these reveal what is actually at stake.  Thus, whether the term “disparities” is used in lieu of “inequalities” or “inequities” actually matters a great deal, at least in part because there is an inescapable ethical valence to the term “inequities” that is absent from the more neutral term “disparities.”  The question is whether the ethical valence is something that ought to be included in public health policy discourse, or whether, given the difficulty in measuring it, it should be avoided where possible.

Comments welcome.

On Polio & Its Histories

Daniel S. Goldberg (East Carolina University) has a new review out on H-Net, commissioned for the History of Disability listserv and entitled Polio and Its Histories.  Like all reviews on H-Net, it is available full-text open-access.  Here is an excerpt:

It is difficult to find a single disease that has inspired a sheer mass of historiography comparable to that addressing polio in the United States. There are myriad reasons for this abundance: the giant shadow cast by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the tendency of many polio epidemics to concentrate among young children and adolescents, the stark visibility of polio, the post-World War Two rise of the American biomedical research enterprise and its connection to the development of a vaccine, and of course the success in virtually eliminating the disease from the American population. Heather Green Wooten situates her work in this broader literature, and this book fills a niche as the first study devoted to assessing the history of polio in Texas during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Drawing primarily on oral and archival techniques, Wooten produces a lively and well-researched account of how Texans understood and responded to polio during those decades.

However, Wooten’s monograph is not disability history.

Comments and suggestions welcome, of course.

On Globalization, Health, & Inequalities

I am off to the 2011 Annual Conference of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.  The theme of the conference is The Globalization of Health Care: Legal and Ethical Challenges.  You can download an outline of the conference participants and papers here (PDF).  The title of my paper is "Global Health Care is Not Global Health: Populations, Inequities, and Law as a Social Determinant of Health."  Here the Abstract:

In this paper, I address a phenomenon that enjoys robust support in the available epidemiologic and demographic evidence base, but one that remains relatively undertheorized in health law and bioethics: the great commonality in both the developing and the developed world of the prime determinants of health, illness, and inequities.  Chief among these are social, economic, and political conditions, conditions which are to a very large extent shaped if not caused by political economies on the global and international scale.  Yet while these political economies are prime movers of population health patterns in both the developed and the developing world, the evidence is compelling that the responsibility for creating such political economies is not equally shared by developed and developing world nations.  If the social and economic conditions that are most deleterious to health in both the developed and the developing worlds are primarily attributable to social, legal, and political structures created or facilitated by the developed world, significant implications follow in terms of justice and obligations owed by the developed world both to their own populations and to developing world communities.  In focusing on the role of political economies in structuring patterns of health and disease at the population level, this paper continues my line of work criticizing the pervasive conflation of health and health care in conceptualizing global health.  Finally, the paper argues that a health sufficiency approach to justice requires scholars to assign relative priority to policy approaches and health interventions that, based on the best evidence, are most likely to address the prime determinants of health across and within the international political order.

I am very much looking forward to rich and meaningful discussion.  After I have the chance to get feedback and criticisms from the participants, I hope to make subsequent drafts available for further commentary. 

On Stress, Racial Inequalities, & Health

The Spring 2011 issue of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race is a Special Issue on Racial Inequality and Health, guest edited by David T. Takeuchi (Univ. Washington) and David Williams (Harvard University).  The full TOC is here (PDF), and some of the articles are available for download free of charge here.

There's a number of fascinating articles in there.  Highly recommended.

(h/t SDOH listserv)

On Early American Roentgenology & the Power of Remotely Anatomizing the Human Body

Daniel S. Goldberg (East Carolina University) has an article out in the latest Bulletin of the History of Medicine entitled Suffering and Death among Early American Roentgenologists: The Power of Remotely Anatomizing the Living Body in Fin de Siècle America.  Here is the Abstract:

This manuscript has two aims. First, I extend the historiography on early American roentgenology that demonstrates that dozens of early adopters knowingly suffered intense pain, mutilation, and death for the sake of the X-ray. The objective is to pinpoint as precisely as possible when and to what extent the roentgenologists knew of the life-threatening risks of X-ray exposure. Second, I articulate a partial explanation for their behavior that is rooted in the social power of remotely anatomizing the living body in fin de siècle American scientific and medical culture.

It is an indescribable honor to have my work published in BHM.  Comments and criticisms are of course welcome.  Electronic copies are available upon request.