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.

The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act (ADAA) established the infamous 100:1 disparity in mandatory minimums for possession of powder versus crack cocaine. Because crack is more often used by black and minority Americans, this law mandated racial disparity in sentencing that contributed to the mass incarceration of black and minority Americans. This chapter analyzes the ADAA, President Reagan’s speeches on the War on Drugs, and contemporary public discourse to demonstrate that laws are rhetorical not only in their textual construction but also in their material function. Judith Butler’s concepts frames of war and precarious life illuminate how the ADAA functions rhetorically to reestablish sociocultural norms of racial division and inequity. In this view, the ADAA is not a failed attempt to counter drug use, but a successful strategy for maintaining a racist status quo. Butler’s theories can help us understand the role of law in shaping sociocultural norms, and therefore to recognize the potential of law to reinscribe and reform those norms.

The Intergovernmental Conference on Rural Hygiene held in Bandung, Dutch East Indies, in August 1937 is often discussed as a precursor to the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care. In this chapter, we investigate the Bandung Conference’s antecedents rather than its legacy. We view “Bandung” as a synthetic formulation of various Southeast Asian initiatives, experiments, and experiences in rural hygiene and social medicine, most of which were designed and developed in areas under colonial rule. Primarily focusing on French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, we explore the meanings of social medicine and rural hygiene in Southeast Asian contexts, where health measures were tied to (colonial) economic objectives, health budgets were limited, and populations mostly rural. However, the delegates at the Bandung Conference proposed highly idealistic programs that could not possibly be realized. Consequently, all lofty plans turned into a mirage that symbolically absolved colonial administrations from their responsibility to safeguard their subject’s health. Social medicine at Bandung was a tool for colonial governmentality at a time when colonial empires were contested and weakened.

Rudolf Virchow is regularly celebrated as one of the fathers of social medicine. This chapter explores the context in which Virchow wrote and published his famous statement that: “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” I discuss Virchow’s epidemiological fact-finding mission to Upper Silesia and his involvement in the revolutionary events of 1848 and 1849. I also look at the ways in which Virchow’s achievements were framed during his lifetime and in the early twentieth century, when medicine in Germany was perceived, by many, to be undergoing a crisis, caused by materialism, specialization, and a growing dominance of laboratory medicine –developments then seen as in-line with Virchow’s aims. I argue that what we think of as social medicine is an American tradition which emerged at a particular point of time in the mid twentieth century and that the image of Virchow as the father of social medicine was created then, by scholars and activists such as George Rosen and Henry Sigerist, to provide this new tradition with a longer pedigree.

This volume offers the beginnings of an answer to the question: “How can we understand and intervene in contemporary legal practice using texts from the rhetorical tradition?” Here, the study of legal rhetoric is conceived as having a macro and a micro scale, much as a mosaic represents a picture, but it is made up of many small pebbles, tiles, or pieces of glass – tesserae. Some rhetorical texts embrace grand theories, sketching perhaps a broad expanse of a picture, but not filling in the tesserae. This volume is decidedly of another kind, depicting a variety of rhetorical traditions as applied to very specific rhetorical performances from the contemporary American legal tradition. This introduction first identifies a set of criteria for evaluating the utility of rhetorical traditions as tools for understanding contemporary legal practices. It then sketches a very brief and incomplete history of the interaction of these two fields. Finally, it describes the contributions of this volume.

This chapter examines two Ghanaian health programs which embodied many ideas and practices of social medicine. The first is a system of village clinic-dispensaries which was built by chiefs and the communities whom they represented, providing treatment and advice to thousands of outpatients. The second is the Medical Field Units (MFUs), which arose from 1945, serving extensive rural areas that lay beyond the reach of both the colonial and early post-independence states. Their successes were recognized by the first government of independent Ghana and after independence in 1957, the MFU program was expanded countrywide and became central to the continued provision of basic health services when other parts of the national health system collapsed. However, ideologies of reduced welfare and severe austerity during Adjustment caused the closing-down of the program in the early 1990s. The chapter relates the evolution of the MFU program to social histories of individual advocacy, healthcare reforms from colonialism to independence, and shifts in internationally circulating economic beliefs regarding the role of welfare and the state.