Sidney Kark and H. Jack Geiger, superstars in the realm of social medicine, both got their start at a community health center in a remote, rural area of South Africa called Pholela. In Pholela, starting in 1940, Sidney Kark and his wife Emily developed what would become Community-Oriented Primary Care (COPC) with a team of Zulu-speaking nurses and community health workers and alongside area residents. In the 1950s, Geiger went to train in Pholela, bringing what he learned back to the United States. This chapter explores the development of COPC from the perspective of the people who lived in the health center’s catchment, uncovering the important role of Pholela’s residents in the creation of COPC and social medicine more generally. As COPC traveled out of Pholela, the efforts of Pholela’s African women were evident in places like Mississippi, USA, as COPC adapted to new realities and new needs. In focusing on Pholela’s residents and the health center’s Zulu-speaking team, this story of social medicine offers an important corrective to more common stories that focus on the doctors and pushes us to rethink how we understand medicine and who contributes to it.

Social medicine, as it was conceived of by left-wing medical doctors in Scandinavia from the 1930s became influential in the creation of a new role for medicine in the making of “the good society” and the political radicalism of social medicine was assimilated into the dominant, social democratic ideology. Several of the pioneers of the left-wing social medicine that had previously aimed for a disruption of the power balances in society, acquired hegemonic positions within the state medical bureaucracy. They constituted an expertise that, by and large, was responsible for the shaping of the national health policies in the “golden age” of the Scandinavian social democratic welfare states (1940s–70s). In this chapter, we discuss the coming into being and passing away of social medicine in the Scandinavian welfare states, exploring how it unfolded in the late twentieth century, in the clinic, in academia, and in health policy. We argue that in spite of its dominance within the central health bureaucracy, social medicine never managed to penetrate mainstream medicine and it left perhaps its strongest footprint abroad, in the field of international health.

The South Asian region consisting of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka share a common history of British colonial rule for nearly 200 years. Most of these countries gained independence during the 1940s. Western European ideas of social medicine found considerable resonance. However, through the process of anti-colonial struggle, new ideas on the relationship between society, medicine, and health were brought to light by actors such as practitioners of indigenous systems of medicine, leadership of the nationalist movement, the communist movement, and radical elements within the medical community and society. This chapter explores the engagement of diverse sets of actors from differing ideological positions that engaged in the relationship between society and health in the Indian subcontinent. It further seeks to explore how the Non-Aligned Movement created by postcolonial societies provided a platform for South–South networks in the economy and social sectors to define inclusive development. In medicine and health, there were efforts to redress inequalities through various reform initiatives that had local importance and influenced global health policies.

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.

The chapter develops the question (raised in Chapter 4) about the precise way in which soul is supposed to play the role of the primary explanans of perception. It does so by bringing out the key difficulty that Aristotle faces and by analysing the three possible answers to this difficulty. The problem is that Aristotle seems to commit himself to three jointly inconsistent tenets: (i) the perceptive soul is the primary cause of perception; (ii) perception is passive; and (iii) the perceptive soul is impassive. These claims are inconsistent if it is true that (iv) there is no way for the soul of being the primary cause of φ-ing other than being the proper subject of whatever φ-ing consists in. Two dominant ways of resolving this problem, since antiquity, consist in denying Aristotle’s commitment to either (ii) or (iii). I argue that difficulties, both exegetical and philosophical, faced by each of these strategies are insurmountable. The third possible strategy starts from denying (iv). I trace such a strategy to the medieval idea of a sensus agens and argue that although the existing medieval (and later) versions cannot stand as such, the third strategy is nevertheless the most promising one.

This chapter analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how they translated into social policy. It argues that Latin American social medicine was a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) (regionally) and Brazilian Association of Collective Health (in Brazil, ABRASCO). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism.

There is a millennia-old tradition of practical reason in the law. For the last two centuries, various determinist imaginaries have chipped away at that tradition, with one of the newest being strict textualism. This chapter contrasts the interpretive methods that Cicero put forward in his early work, De Inventione, dating to the early first century BCE, with those presented by a greatly influential 2012 book coauthored by Justice Antonin Scalia, Reading Law. The chapter contends that Reading Law offers a method for interpreting, or construing, legal texts that is replete with the hallmarks of practical reason, but the rhetoric with which Reading Law characterizes its method is thoroughly deterministic. This chapter contends that this rhetoric encourages judges to hide their reasoning behind application of simplistic (and often incorrect) “rules” for textual interpretation. The chapter illustrates the contrast in the two approaches by discussing a Texas Court of Appeals opinion – which exhibits Ciceronian practical reason – and the Texas Supreme Court’s opinion in the same case – which exhibits Scalian determinism.

The chapter explores how Aristotle wants to account for perception’s essentially receptive nature. It focuses on Aristotle’s commitment to the passivity of perception, namely, the idea that perception is a certain kind of being affected (paskhein) by perceptual objects. It provides a classification and preliminary critical analysis of existing interpretations of the passivity of perception. I argue that Aristotle’s first general account of perception in An. 2.5 is systematically pre-causal in the sense that makes it impossible to directly infer from it anything specific about the respective roles of the body and the soul (against both Material and Psychic Interpretation). Furthermore, I contend that Aristotle develops a robust conception of passivity here that successfully encapsulates, on the most general level, what perception is (against Deflationary and Aporetic Interpretation). More specifically, I argue that An. 2.5 is centrally aimed at reconciling perception’s passivity and completeness (the perceiver has both seen and is seeing the same object) and that this task is motivated by the need for capturing the difference between genuine (‘continued’) perceiving and mere appearance within an assimilation model of perception.

Despite widespread and well-reasoned objections to its methods, originalism has gained widespread prominence as the au courant doctrine of legal interpretation. This chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of originalism’s ethos – namely its communal indwelling rooted in rule of law and American democratic values – to explain its strange persistence as well as provide a critical starting point for developing effective critical interventions in future jurisprudential debates about the merits of originalism as a theory of legal meaning. Drawing from Martin Heidegger’s theorizing of ethos, the chapter reconceptualizes ethos and recovers its full meaning beyond good character and wisdom. The chapter situates this full meaning within the emergence of modern originalism as represented in the work of Professor Raoul Berger and then traces the meaning’s evolution through the work of Justice Antonin Scalia and Professor Larry Solum, who both rely on the ethos of indwelling to overcome originalism’s deficiencies rather than their perceived ethos of personal character and effective reasoning. The chapter demonstrates that it was Berger, Scalia, and Solum’s ability to connect their work to a deep-seated shared sense of communal identity that enabled them to secure a place of pride for originalism in jurisprudential debates.

This chapter examines the anonymous Dissoi Logoi, attributed to a sophistic author in Greece in the late fifth century BCE. The chapter uses the ancient text, and the practices of listening that it implies, to imagine how law students might be taught to listen rhetorically to the materials they encounter in their training. To focus the discussion, the chapter analyzes how a contemporary law school casebook teaches State v. Norman, a case about a woman convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of her abusive husband. The case is included in a number of criminal law casebooks to teach theories of self-defense; it is also widely cited and discussed by scholars of intimate partner violence law and advocacy. The chapter argues that case books have the potential to encourage students to listen to arguments on either side of a question but that this potential can be thwarted by editorial decisions. It suggests ways that readers can listen rhetorically to law school materials to hear not only the multiple voices present (and missing) from cases but also the voices framing the cases.

The second wave of Latin American social medicine overlaps with the turmoil of the Cold War as the region experienced processes of anti-communism, military coups, and state violence. A landmark in its history is the establishment of the Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) in 1984, which today represents the longest-standing transnational organization in the field regionally, exploring the social basis of population health from a leftist political tradition. The association’s account of its origin points to Juan Cesar Garcia and his team at the Pan-America Health Organization (PAHO) as centralizing figures that guided the second wave to new grounds of internationalism. According to the collective, Garcia and the PAHO’s Department of Human Resources helped connect a scattered group of leftist scholars throughout the region’s public universities into the so-called Latin American social medicine Network, enabling a fruitful exchange of ideas and principles that continue to this day.

The chapter starts by outlining the version of direct realism endorsed by Aristotle. I argue that he was committed to uncompromised realism about perceptible qualities and to the view that we immediately perceive the bearers of these qualities without any need of further synthetic acts. These features highlight the difficulty of capturing the explanantia of perception. Two notions key to that endeavour are those of mediation and discrimination. The chapter provides a novel analysis of mediation (for discrimination, see Chapter 6), arguing that, for Aristotle, media are – more or less perfect – qualitative conductors. Furthermore, the chapter addresses the existing debate about what, according to Aristotle, happens in the sense organs when we perceive. I argue that the dilemma governing this debate between spiritualism and materialism (either ‘literalist’ or ‘analogical’) is a false one. Tertium datur, and this alternative turns out to be precisely the view Aristotle embraced: perception consists of a thoroughly material process, but what this process results in must not be a standing material likeness (which would mark the end of perception because like cannot be affected by like), but a dynamic ‘phenomenal’ likeness – the presence of a quality of the perceived object which remains to be precisely a quality of that object.