14Science and Medicine

Abstract

Abstract This year’s review highlights scholarship in the history of science and medicine that rejects easy teleologies of scientific progress and overturns tidy, nationally oriented historical accounts of biomedical practice. Here, we recognize four studies that serve as models in cutting-edge, decolonial scholarship in the field. These works acknowledge the contingent and socially constructed nature of both science and medicine and center long-understudied healers, patients, and communities who have traditionally existed outside of normative Western archives and the historical record. In section 1, ‘The Politics of Plague in the Invisible Commonwealth’, Cindy Ermus’s monograph explores the impact of a fairly contained, regional plague event in Provence, which catalysed a series of increasingly centralized disaster and public health management measures that emerged across the West and the colonies. Section 2, ‘Interspecies Contact Zones and American Xenophobia’, considers Jeannie N. Shinozuka’s research on the racist parallels that American culture drew between Asian plant and insect migration and anti-Asian policies and practices across the twentieth century. Section 3, ‘Transhistorical and Transborder Healers’, studies Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez’s edited collection on traditional and Indigenous healers and patients across Latin America from the seventeenth century to the present, and the fluid and complex boundaries between their practices and those of Western and imperial medicine. Finally, section 4, ‘Imagining and Enforcing the Boundaries of Gender’, resituates such medical boundaries to the site of the clinic, following Sandra Eder’s account of the highly contingent and artificial construction of gender and gender normativity that emerged across the twentieth century. These studies, to use the words of Diego Armus and Pablo F. Gómez, exemplify an understanding of the ways that categories like medicine, health, illness, disaster, and indeed identity itself ‘have not only a biological dimension but also social, cultural, political, and economic connotations’ that are ‘historically located processes whose seeming social and cultural dominance was never preordained or inevitable’ (Armus and Gómez, p. 6). Tellingly, each of these studies connects transborder and transhistorical incidents and events—some largely known, others newly revealed—to our contemporary moment, demonstrating how the urgent crises, fiery debates, and institutional pressures that preoccupied individuals and whole nations in both the recent and distant past continue to shape the demands of our present and future.