“Ethnic Space and Medical Practice in Informal Empire: British Doctors and Malaria Science in Muscat, Oman: 1877-1915”

Laura Goffman (Georgetown University, Department of History)

Attempts to apply emerging European understandings of disease and biomedicine to the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Arab Gulf region were an early manifestation of developing state-society interactions in the context of informal British Empire. This paper examines two texts written by British medical officers addressing malaria in Muscat that demonstrate the conjunction of science and empire with the indigenous population. The first, “Medical Topography of Muscat” (1877) by British Agency Surgeon Atmaran Sadashiva Grandin Jayakar; and the second, “Malaria in Muscat” (1916) by Major Clifford Gill. These texts exemplify how global—but European-dominated—scientific modes of thinking about malaria interacted with local political and economic conditions and how racialized discourse regarding the local population appeared in colonial representations of medical space in Muscat.

This presentation places these texts in dialogue with each other to ask, first, how did the radical change in scientific understandings of malaria (mosquitoes rather than bad air) at the global level impact the way that British agents imagined and represented race and ethnic space in Muscat and its environs? Second, what was the process of translating such medical and scientific knowledge to the indigenous community, and how did this new understanding of disease interact with local disease imaginaries? My paper argues that in the context of transformed notions of the cause of malaria, imperial medical understandings became less commensurable with local forms of medical knowledge, further crystalizing representations of racial hierarchies in terms of sanitation, health, and ethnic typologies.

“The Cult of Youth: Commercialising Scientific Rejuvenation in Interwar Europe”

James Stark (University of Leeds)

The twentieth century saw an unprecedented increase in life expectancies in the developed world. Alongside this trend, numerous different methods of slowing, halting, or even reversing the aging process have been touted as possible ways of extending life without the need for the micromanagement of lifestyle. Focusing on the transformative interwar period, this paper asks how the different ways that people have attempted rejuvenation – the restoration of youth or the appearance of youth – have changed over time, and what they can tell us about our shifting relationship with ageing and our bodies. Whilst there were numerous different methods and products which claimed to achieve rejuvenation for the anxious ager, this paper concentrates on the central role of everyday methods, such as hormone creams, electrotherapy devices and dietary practices, and in particular the ways in which daily, domestic routines drew inspiration from spectacular and sensationalized surgical interventions which promised to make the old young. Drawing on the work of Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Chandak Sengoopta and others, I argue that our understanding of the social and physiological dimensions of ageing and rejuvenation were fundamentally changed by new anxieties about bodily and social fitness. This highly gendered process drew on scientific ideas of regeneration and development and were exacerbated by commercial interests. As a result, the centuries-old, fantastical preoccupation with elixirs, philosopher’s stones and “cures” for ageing was gradually transformed into pragmatic, everyday solutions designed to restore lost vital force, extend fertility, and present a more youthful face to the world.

“Designing America's Healthcare System: Basil O'Connor, Public Relations, and the Crusade Against Polio in America”

Julia Marino (Dartmouth College)

Basil O’Connor, the philanthropist who led the American crusade against polio, had a vision for national healthcare and scientific research policy. As president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) from 1938 to 1955, O’Connor claimed to have invented a new public health model: no non-profit had ever before or ever since launched such a complete assault on a single disease. The NFIP financed all scientific research related to polio and guaranteed free patient care to 80% of American victims. While the postwar period was a watershed moment in the expansion of the government’s role in science, Basil O’Connor deliberately set out to demonstrate that both patient care and scientific research could be provided by a non-governmental organization and that federal contributions to public health and scientific research were unnecessary.

This paper will examine the tactics that NFIP leaders deployed to thwart government contributions to the polio effort on both a federal and state level to preserve the Foundation's total control. O’Connor colluded with allies in the American Medical Association to help block Truman’s National Health Plan in 1946, and in 1948, NFIP leaders lobbied in Congress against a special commission for polio research in the proposed National Science Foundation. This paper argues that O’Connor’s public relations mastery and anti-government agenda led a generation of Americans to believe that the voluntary health organizations could offer a solution to American public health challenges.

“Knowledge in Motion: The Transfer of Pilates Practices from Germany to the United States”

Brianne Wesolowski (Vanderbilt University)

Beginning in the 1990s, the practice of Pilates resurfaced in American popular culture after spending several decades in specialized niches, mostly amongst dance communities. The name Pilates is common enough, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which Joseph Pilates’s historical contexts affected his techniques, his inventions, and his knowledge of the body. The contours of his intellectual trajectory was shaped not only by German life reform mentalities but also by his internment during the First World War at an English POW camp, where he encountered and rehabilitated wounded bodies. It was there that Pilates began to develop his own system and technologies, making use of suspension and spring tension, which he later applied to boxers in Hamburg and after 1926, to dancers, performers, and social elites living in New York City. By tracing the transnational movement of the technologies and craft knowledge inherent to Pilates’s program, I argue that he was successful in transplanting these practices to the US because his system offered a meditation on several defining tensions of modernism: between nature and artifice, between psychology and physiology, and between the individual and the universal. Moreover, because life reform tendencies had already traversed the Atlantic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his ideas fell on fertile ground. Thus, while historians have often described the German life reform postures as “anti-modern,” this paper will demonstrate the ways in which the mentalities that underpinned the German movement also resonated with American moderns in New York City.

“India’s Polio-Free Status: A Case Study in post-Cold War Health Politics”

Gourav Krishna Nandi (Yale University)

This article situates the goals of India’s participation in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in the developmentalist rhetoric of the Indian state and its ambitions in foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War. In 2014, India attained polio-free status in the context of a growing number of Non-Polio Acute Flaccid Paralysis (NP-AFP) cases, which has annually affected more than ten thousand children in the country even after the eradication of polio. This paper shows how in the year 2000, the WHO developed a new virological scheme of classification that reduced the number of polio cases, and created a new category of paralysis, NP-AFP. While epidemiologists traced the increasing number of cases of non-polio paralysis cases in high-risk states of the country between 2005 and 2015, poor environmental sanitation and reduced state funding for research in non-polio pathogens facilitated an attitude of neglect by the state toward the disease. This article argues that the polio-free status offered the state an opportunity to establish a model global health campaign for low-and middle-income countries and accumulate symbolic capital from the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. To that end, despite the large expenditure to eradicate polio, paralysis due to non-polio enteroviruses have been largely neglected and primary healthcare in the country has remained heavily underfunded. India’s achievement of the polio-free status, therefore, cannot be treated as the result of humanitarian domestic policy, and must be situated in the context of the state’s political goals.