DSCY10120 Contagion & Control

Academic Year 2022/2023

The explosive outbreak of COVID-19 has transformed the world we inhabit. Within months of its first report in late December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 infected hundreds of millions of bodies, triggered quarantine of billions of people, and wiped out trillions of dollars of market value. Like perhaps no other disease, COVID-19 has highlighted both the interconnectivity of global environments and societies and the fragility of the health systems we have put in place to control emerging disease. But were we always so vulnerable to disease? And how did previous generations deal with emerging and existing health challenges? Contagion & Control draws on new research from across the medical humanities and sciences to introduce students to over 200 years of disease control efforts, the effects of globalisation in spreading disease landscapes and health systems across the world, and the conflicting pressures shaping current global health.

Students will learn how crises like COVID-19 are rooted in the dramatic changes that global disease environments and the way humans manage their health underwent over the past 200 years. During this time, population growth, mass migration, climate change, and ever faster travel connected and transformed once distinct disease environments. Biologically, once local diseases like cholera and HIV spread around the globe. Culturally, the rise of medical science in the nineteenth century replaced older humoral understandings of illness. Politically, these changes were closely associated with the rise of powerful industrialised nation states and colonial empires, which depended on new forms of medicine to secure their hold on power. Biomedical interventions like vaccines against smallpox, typhoid, rinderpest, and other diseases, improved sanitation, and drug treatments like antibiotics played an important role in improving human and animal health. Yet the health systems these medical interventions were embedded in, such as the socialist systems of the communist sphere or the semi-private systems in the Americas, as well as the increasing international coordination of health politics, enabled unprecedented levels of centralised control over individuals' lives. Resulting tensions between the desire to implement uniform top-down health policies and calls for more nuanced, culturally-attuned policies, which co-rely on local actors like traditional healers, persist to this day – as do tensions between strengthening basic health care and prioritizing more targeted technological interventions like vaccines. Understanding these tensions as part of the broader mutual evolution of societies, disease, environments, and health systems improves our knowledge of the past and provides valuable insights for the global health challenges of the present.