While metropolitan France saw the repression of abortion in the early 20th century, against a backdrop of pro-natalist policy, pregnancy terminations were encouraged by authorities on Réunion Island after 1945. These practices shed light on a biopower constructed at the intersection of gender, class, and race.
Historian Guillaume Lachenal set off on the trail of Dr David, in post in Wallis and Futuna and then Cameroon in the interwar period. Through the life of this little known figure, Lachenal’s investigation highlights the authoritarian excesses of colonial medicine.
What determines the value of a drug? Quentin Ravelli’s ethnographic study of the pharmaceutical industry reveals the ubiquity of drugs manufacturers, from university training programmes to doctors’ practices, and the commercial logic that underpins the medical use of drugs.
The Renaissance reinvented modesty – that contradictory passion which reveals while hiding. In a masterful book, Dominique Brancher shows how this art of circumvention spanned a variety of knowledge, especially medical knowledge, in the sixteenth century.
Qi—“breath” or “energy”—lies at the heart of many traditional Asian practices, be they martial or artistic, that rest upon a broader understanding of mind and body. This concept has now become pervasive in Western ideas of health and spirituality. Could this trend be a positive effect of globalization?
The question of the origin of AIDS has given rise to a wealth of studies. Moving away from conspiracy theories or culturalist readings, Guillaume Lachenal shows that the key issue is retracing the colonial, epidemiological, and sexual context that fostered the propagation of the virus rather than identifying a specific cause.
