Socialist tropical medicine: climate, disease and revolution

• Department of History

Lecture by Bogdan Iacob (Nicolae Iorga Institute of History/Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies) co-organised by the History of Science and Medicine Working Group.

The presentation explores narratives about the tropics formulated by state socialist physicians in the context of communist aid to newly decolonized peoples. There was a transition from anticolonial critiques of medical essentializations to a full embrace of tropical medicine as a field showcasing socialist modernity. On the one hand, Eastern Europeans highlighted the colonial origins of tropical medicine. Assistance (either bilateral or via the World Health Organization) to post-colonial governments focused on the social-economic determinants of infectious diseases. Medicine was a conduit for tackling the structural causes of ill-health, a factor in the non-capitalist transformation the Global South. Last but not least, learning about maladies at the tropics was a vehicle for East-South scientific cooperation, as socialist experts brought home knowledge developed by their post-colonial peers. 

On the other hand, greater East-West cooperation catalysed by détente and the WHO’s Special Programme for research and training in tropical diseases (since 1976) facilitated the convergence between state socialist and liberal tropical medicine. Tropical distinctiveness, a lingering yet muted motif of socialist medical narratives during the late 1950s and the 1960s, held centre stage in the last two decades of the Cold War. Narratives about non-European , exotic diseases hardened civilizational differences and facilitated racialisations about developing countries and their peoples. Tropical medicine in Eastern Europe, just like in the West, was integral to the securitization of relations with the Global South: brown and black persons turned into meretriciously healthy carriers of non-endemic diseases threatening civilized socialist states. The interplay between anti-colonialism and securitization fuelled socialist tropical medicine as epistemic background for Second World whiteness. This knowledge and the social-political imaginary that accompanied it was rooted in interwar colonial fantasies and carried into post-socialist Europeanization.

Bogdan C. Iacob is a researcher at the "Nicolae Iorga" Institute of History (Romanian Academy) and at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences). His work centers on the role of Eastern European experts (e.g., historians and physicians) at international organizations and in post-colonial spaces. Among his publications: Health in Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Cambridge UP, 2022) and Malariology and decolonization: Eastern European experts from the League of Nations to the World Health Organization , Journal of Global History (2022). Most recently he published Health as a Human Right and Eastern European Anti-Colonialism in Socialism and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2024).