Recasting Aging and Degenerative Disease: International Experts and Studies on the Geographic Pathology of Cancer in India and South Africa, 1950–60

This paper will trace how chronic, degenerative diseases became a growing focus of biological and medical research on aging in the 1940-50s amongst a network of international experts.  In these writings, diseases such as cancer were associated primarily with modern societies with aging populations that had overcome infectious diseases. In the same years, some of this knowledge also began to circulate to sites beyond the west, into ‘young’ societies where diseases of aging and degeneration were seemingly absent.  This paper will explore how gerontologists, epidemiologists and pathologists shaped ‘international knowledge’ regarding aging and degenerative disease in western societies, and what constituted this ‘universal’ template to explain aging? Its focus will be on how experts from India and South Africa reconstituted these ideas and flows at the local level through an international project to map the geographical pathology of cancer in Asia and Africa. Their research  addressed and challenged questions of ‘difference’ and explored questions about about how ‘backward’ populations that led short, brutish lives could experience diseases of civilization and aging. It also used persistent paradigms from tropical medicine regarding climates and constitutions, and elaborated upon the ‘location’ or embodiment of cancers in different organs to offer local registers that contributed to and informed back this global knowledge of aging and disease.