Call for additional chapters

Rudolf Virchow’s much quoted aphorism “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale” (1848) dominated an era, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, when medicine provided a series of concepts, instruments and practices, models and experiments, to a range of social and political experiences, in projects such as hygienism, eugenism, social medicine, or colonialism. By contrast, the 1960s opened an era when an increasing number of activists, health experts, and social and life scientists, could have claimed that “medicine is nothing else but politics, and social science is a foundation of medicine”. Across a variety of health domains, experts and lay people developed discourses and practices with the aim of intervening in, correcting and at times fundamentally changing, society. Thus, various social mobilizations reflected, were based on, or challenged medical discourses and practices.

The book, which we are planning to propose for publication by September 2024, explores how medicine and health have developed into a central field for social movements in the second half of the twentieth and into the early twenty-first century across the globe. It will provide a conceptual framework for analyzing the configurations in which medicine, its professionals and its public, have participated in or have been the target of various social movements. Contributors will present case studies at the local, national and transnational levels from the 1960s to the early twenty-first century, dealing with a variety of health and social issues, and showing in each case how this mobilization produced effects on medicine and society. The volume will reflect on the emergence of social movements in medicine, such as patient-organization or anti-medicine mobilizations, showing how they challenged medical power and established new standards, such as the ethical regulation of medical practices or access to rights. At the same time, the contributions will also explore how health professionals have contributed to or been enrolled in social movements that originated outside medicine, such as workers or women mobilizations.

The originality of the volume is that it is structured around the notion of social movements, and not of medicine. This focus allows the contributors to explore an array of interactions between social movements and health, covering professional, lay, and patient perspectives. Thus, the book will be of interest not only to scholars working on health and medicine, but also to social movement researchers and a broader public.

Following a workshop on health and social mobilization in May 2023, we have secured most of the book’s chapters. However, in order to make the book more inclusive, we are launching an additional call, aiming at attracting chapters on specific topics and parts of the world, more specifically:

- On South America, Africa, and Asia
- On women’s health, disability, and vaccination

If you are interested in joining the project, please send a half-page abstract by October 31, 2023. Abstracts need to detail (as appropriate) content, argument, sources/evidence/data, methodology, and how the literature is being built upon. Additionally, in order to guarantee the coherence of the volume and strengthen our book proposal, we are asking all authors to consider and address the following questions/ key issues in both their abstract and paper):

- What is meant by the term social movement in each case study? (Typical and atypical examples, different contexts, e.g. capitalist/socialist, 1960-70s/ contemporary…)
- What were the aims or objectives of the social movement in question, and how did it seek to reach these?
- How can we analyze the relationship between medicine and social movement organizations? Who were the leaders of the mobilization, who were its constituents and its public? From where did it draw its capital, both financial and symbolic (its concepts and analysis)?
- How was health and illness defined and redefined in each case study through social critique and action?

Please, also include in your abstract five keywords and specify whether any of the work has been published elsewhere (e.g., journal articles, book chapters, university repository) and/ or whether it is based on the research done for a PhD thesis. Finally, let us know if you would like or need to publish your chapter open access.

We envision chapters of 6000 words to be delivered by the end of February 2024. Our team will go through all chapters and get back to the authors with suggestions. You will have approximately two months to respond and send us back your chapter, before we submit the full manuscript by September 2024.

Feel free to contact any of us, if you have any questions and/ or if you would like to discuss your idea.