Session Abstract

The roundtable, “A Prospectus for Global Health History,” brings together scholars who work on the historical impacts of major global diseases such as beriberi, malaria, leprosy, and bubonic plague and on the social, economic, and biomedical impacts of global health initiatives. The panelists will discuss new approaches to the history of disease that they have used in their work and offer reflections on the emergence of a new research field.

Global Health History has a broad writ. It addresses the critical ways in which human uses of our biophysical and cultural environments have exacerbated, limited, or ameliorated the effects of pathogens on human communities.  On all five continents that humans have inhabited, we have experienced disease.  Some diseases we brought along with us on our migrations.  Others we encountered in new environments.  Still others arose from conditions that humans themselves created, when we shifted to new modes of food production or transportation, and thereby transformed our interactions with other species.

New scientific studies of pathogens are transforming the histories of human health and disease that we can tell in the present day.  And it is increasingly obvious that many of those stories must be told within a global framework.  Infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, leprosy, plague, syphilis, cholera, and HIV/AIDS have afflicted humans on every single continent.  Nutritional and degenerative conditions are also broadly universal in their potential impact.  Our panelists will engage with the new scientific work in fields such as genomics, parasitology, entomology, nutritional science, and paleopathology that is transforming our understandings of the material history of disease.  These new approaches allow historians to move beyond written texts in search of evidence.  By both engaging with the deep past and moving broadly across geographical space, we can bring historical perspective to bear on the comparative analysis of disease experiences across cultures in more recent times.