Description: In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Brief description: Warwick Anderson is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance, and Ethics in Health, Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney.
Review Quotes: 'Medicine on a Larger Scale offers multiple visions of social medicine as an idea, field of research and teaching, form of practice, critique of health policy, and approach to the Planet's problems. This intriguing and useful collection also places social medicine in a truly global context and gives voice to social medicine traditions form the South that are less well-known than the stories it also presents from Euro-American history. A step forward in imagining a counter-biomedicine that can better connect social suffering and healing with interpretive social science, post-colonial imaginings, and some of the more serious problems of the world. Impressive!' Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University