Under the umbrella of solidarity missions, since the early 1960s, Cuba’s socialist government has dispatched tens of thousands of medical brigades to geographically diverse locales. This approach to humanitarian medical aid, according to the Cuban government, is an act of solidarity grounded in an ethos of social justice. The magnitude of this brand of humanitarianism far outpaces the most iconic faces of the contemporary global health industry. Despite these important if not groundbreaking roles in primary healthcare, for most readers in North America and Europe, Cuba likely occupies the rhetorical and discursive space of the singular “case study” or “alternative,” if it even makes an appearance. How do we understand the absence–presence of Cuba’s medical-internationalism efforts as a non-event in the global health landscape? This chapter explores the structuring logics shaping global health’s dominant script – the problematics, concepts, methods, and practices – that render different imaginaries of care and aid illegible, thus unthinkable.

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.

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.

Tracing early Arab-Islamic iterations of women’s rights, this chapter revisits Prophet Muḥammad’s “Farewell Speech” (khuṭbat al-wadā‘), which is often in/directly invoked in vernacular discourses to structure arguments for women’s rights. Situating this speech within a discourse on equality and positive/negative rights and obligations, this chapter sheds light on early Arab(ic)-Islamic discourses on women’s rights and uses the concept of vernacular rhetoric of human rights to draw attention to more recent iterations of women’s rights. The chapter fast-forwards to a speech on women’s rights by Malak-Hifnī Nāṣif (1886–1918), Egyptian writer, intellectual, and reformer, whose pen name is Bāhithat al-Bādīyah. She proposed ten articles to promote women’s rights, including marital and epistemic rights. Finally, the chapter moves to 2019 and the highly publicized Arab Charter on Women’s Rights launched by the Federal National Council of the United Arab Emirates in conjunction with the Arab Parliament. The chapter uses these three iterations of women’s rights to underline key topoi of (women’s) rights discourse.

Despite the influence of key figures like Henry Sigerist and the Rockefeller Foundation, social medicine achieved a formal presence at only a handful of medical schools in the US, partly reflecting the political context in which “social medicine” was often heard as “socialized medicine.” Work that might otherwise have been called social medicine had to pass under other names. Does “social medicine” in the US only include those who self-identified with social medicine or does it include people who worked in the spirit of social medicine? Beginning with the recognized work of Sigerist and the Rockefeller, we then examine several Black social theorists whose work can now be recognized as social medicine. The Cold War context challenged would-be proponents of social medicine but different threads endured. The first, clinically oriented, focused on community health. The second, based in academic departments, applied the interpretive social sciences to explore the interspace between the clinical and the social. These threads converged in the 1990s and 2000s in new forms of social medicine considered as healthcare committed to social justice and health equity.

The chapter sheds fresh light on Aristotle’s account of perception by providing a novel analysis of the puzzles that he articulates within his discussion of the predecessors’ views, especially in An. 1. I argue that Aristotle takes the key insight of the traditional view that like is perceived by like to be expressed in the idea that the perceiver is like the perceptual object by which she is being affected. This idea seems inconsistent with the widely shared assumption that only unlike things can act upon each other. Aristotle’s predecessors were unable to resolve this tension (the notion of a generic likeness is of no help), but he believes that precisely this tension must be resolved by any successful account of what perception is. The only predecessor who at least hinted towards a resolution is Anaxagoras with his account of impassive nous (understood by Aristotle as a general account of cognition). But Anaxagoras failed to account for the causal aspects of cognition as a way of being affected by its object. Aristotle’s own account can be seen as an attempt to incorporate the true insights of both the view that in perception like is affected by like and the view that what perceives must be impassive.

Brazil has a long tradition in the public health arena, with roots that can be traced to the colonial period, when the first medical schools were established in the country. The recent history of the field, however, became deeply intertwined with the struggle to re-democratize the country after the military coup of 1964. As part of a broad coalition, the movement for health reform was seeded by left-leaning public health physicians who were instrumental in designing what would become Brazil’s national healthcare system, the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS), after the restoration of democracy. The creation of the Instituto de Medicina Social (Social Medicine Institute, IMS) at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro State University) in 1970 was closely followed by the introduction of its Masters course in Social and Preventive Medicine in 1974, one of the pioneers in the field in Latin America, and is an important part of this development. The professors and researchers at the IMS were important actors both in the development of a theoretical body of work as well as in political at different levels of government. The account of this institution’s history, partially based on personal experience, is an important element of the general history of the field in Brazil.

The chapter provides a novel detailed analysis of one of the most discussed chapters in the Aristotelian corpus, namely An. 2.5. The central claim is that in An. 2.5 Aristotle lays down his programmatic definition of perception as a complete passive activity. He does so by classing the perceptive capacity with capacities that are already fulfilments (entelekheiai) of their subjects and by showing how this classification is compatible with perception being passive (i.e. a kind of being affected). By working out the concept of complete passive activity Aristotle fills in a conceptual gap left open elsewhere in the corpus (most strikingly in Metaphysics Θ.6), where both completeness and passivity are taken for granted but without showing how the two features can cohere. In An. 2.5, Aristotle, thus, succeeds in capturing how perception differs not only from manifestations of non-passive complete capacities (such as the art of house-building), but also from passive processes (as exhibited in the inexhaustibility of the perceptive capacity and the object-directedness of perception). His definition is programmatic in the sense that it analyses the explananda without, however, yet providing any explanantia.

The Conclusion sums up the main results of the study and their philosophical relevance. It focuses on the notion of complete passive activities; Aristotle’s integration of causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception; his dynamic account of perception, which defies the standard dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism; the central dilemma for Aristotle’s endeavour to explain perception, as well as the prospects of the homeostatic solution; and finally the promise of the present study to also provide the groundwork for a better understanding of Aristotle’s account of intellectual cognition.

This chapter explores the US Supreme Court’s “shadow docket,” the growing number of emergency orders and summary decisions that lack the transparency and consistency of cases granted and decided on their merits. It examines the Court’s practices in the shadow docket through the lens of the modern classic, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric, which itself adapted and adopted many concepts from the ancient Western rhetorical tradition. It then applies this lens to Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, a 2020 shadow-docket case relating to state restrictions on religious gatherings during COVID.

This chapter compares two very different authors separated by almost four centuries on the problem of women’s social position. Mary Astell, one of the earliest English feminists, examined these questions in 1694 in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She believed that women were not living up to their intellectual potential and were relegated to the realm of trivia and frivolity by the social norms of the period. In 2019, the American Bar Association published a report entitled Walking Out the Door: The Facts, Figures, and Future of Experienced Women Lawyers in Private Practice. Focusing on America’s 350 largest law firms, the report found that women with more than fifteen years of experience are leaving law firms in droves. Like Astell, the report attributed this failure to thrive to male-created cultural norms. Although the two authors agree that women should be able to thrive in a man’s world but aren’t doing so, they rhetorically engage the problem very differently.

The Introduction articulates the central question about the nature of perception and sets it within the explanatory project of Aristotle’s De Anima. What makes Aristotle’s account attractive, I argue, is that it strives to accommodate causal, qualitative, and relational features of perception. A central insight of Aristotle’s account is captured under the notion of perception as a complete passive activity, but that notion has, since late antiquity, appeared paradoxical to readers of De Anima and was, thus, systematically disregarded. The Introduction analyses the historical and philosophical reasons for this disregard. It further articulates the key dilemma pertaining to Aristotle’s view of the role played in perception by the soul: it should be the primary cause of an essentially passive and receptive activity, but it should itself remain unmoved and impassive; how can that be? Although this question has received relatively little attention among recent scholars, it is argued to be more crucial than the much-discussed issue of what happens in the perceiver’s sense organs. The final section of the Introduction outlines the argument of the entire book.

From Virchow to Allende, social medicine had been intertwined with left-wing or socialist political thought for over a century. While the prominence or significance of this connection ebbed and flowed in Western Europe and North America, the basic tenets underpinning social medicine gained new purchase in the “Global East” with the rise of state socialism and the emergence of a socialist world. Ideas around the role of social, environmental, and economic factors in health, coupled with revolutionary aims of new socialist regimes. What constituted “socialist medicine” and in what way did this, ideologically based concept prevalent in the East relate to ideas of “social medicine” in the West during the Cold War? Through and Eastern European lens, this chapter traces connections between socialist politics and health in emerging practices and ideas to map divergences and overlaps in what became a key issue in the Cold War that, at least in its rhetoric, set apart East and West.