Event location
Seminars will take place at Seminar Room 218, FHH (Frederik Holsts hus), 12:15-13:30.
Zoom link for those wishing to attend online.
Abstract
What is social medicine? There is not, and never has been, a single consensual definition - and that has perhaps been at the same time been its primary asset and its primary problem. In this presentation Anne Kveim Lie will present hers and Per Haave's contribution to a volume that Anne is editing together with Jeremy Greene and Warwick Anderson on the global histories of social medicine. The volume aims to decenter the oftentimes heroic and Eurocentric narratives of social medicine starting with Virchow, highlighting important but in the historiography often neglected contributions to social medicine from Asia and Latin America, suggesting a de-canonized and revised social medicine rooted in anticolonial struggles and nationalist aspirations, committed to social and racial justice and to health equity.
Our contribution to the volume tells the hitherto neglected history of Scandinavian social medicine, which was a field largely informed in the beginning by Marxist and Freudian theory and became influential in the creation of a new role for medicine in the making of ‘the good society’ in the burgeoning welfare state. We discuss the coming into being and passing away of social medicine as a crucial interdisciplinary field in the Scandinavian welfare states. What happened to social medicine as it turned from being a tool for revolutionary change to being a discipline providing some of the most crucial tools of the architects of the burgeoning social democratic welfare states? Could social medicine survive as it became inextricably bound up within the political project of the welfare state? What happened to social medicine’s ambitions to disrupt the current power balances in society when the persons proposing them were themselves in hegemonic positions? We will explore how social medicine unfolded in the late 20th century in health policy, in research and in the clinic, but also by describing some of the crucial blindspots of the field as it unfolded.