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  • The influenza pandemic of 1918–1920, which killed 50 000 Canadians, spurred the creation of a federal department of public health. But in the intervening century, public health at all levels has remained, as Marc Lalonde put it in 1988, the “poor cousin” in the health care system (Lalonde 1988, p. 77). Punctuated by sporadic investment during infectious disease crises, such as polio in the early 1950s, public health is less of a priority as the cost of tertiary health interventions rises. While public health potentially involves a broad range of interventions, this paper focuses on the history of public health interventions around infectious disease. COVID-19 has forced us to relearn the importance of maintaining basic infectious/communicable disease control capacity and revealed the cost of our failure to do so. It has also drawn our attention to the intersection between social inequality, racism, and colonialism and vulnerability to disease. In addition to investing in our capacity to contain disease outbreaks as they occur, we must plan now for how to achieve greater health equity in the future by addressing underlying economic and social conditions and providing meaningful access to preventive care for all. This is how we build a truly resilient society. Governments at all levels have recognized the importance of social factors in shaping health and illness for decades. But greater health equity will result only from genuine action on this knowledge. Action will arise from public advocacy in support of prevention, and a new level of engagement and collaboration between affected individuals and communities, public health experts, and governments.

  • This chapter examines the impact of colonialism on the “invention” of Vietnamese medicine (VM) in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses more specifically on the legal framework dealing with VM in the interwar period, when Vietnamese nationalism was on the rise and French colonial authorities were assessing the “successes” and “failures” of the Assistance Médicale Indigène (AMI), the colonial health care system established in 1905. I argue that this invention was at the same time pragmatic, programmatic, and ideological; it aimed at “naturalizing” the AMI to adapt it to local medical needs within the imperial framework and French budgetary constraints. Bridging political, institutional, professional, and therapeutic spaces, this article brings into focus the process whereby VM was not only domesticated, but legally defined for the first time and given specific roles within the colonial health care system. Analysing the discourses framing VM as a “traditional,” “complementary,” and “natural” medicine, I explore the different meanings of science, toxicity, and tradition in this context, as well as the issue of accessibility to essential care. I emphasize the participation of the Vietnamese population, especially Vietnamese doctors and healers, in this process. In so doing, this article helps to reconsider the historiography of traditional medicine worldwide and underlines the importance of a postcolonial approach to a much-needed history of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Last but not least, it highlights the impact of colonialism on the framing of a “national medicine” that would play a crucial role in post-1954 Vietnam medicalization and nation building.

Dernière mise à jour depuis la base de données : 17/07/2025 13:00 (EDT)

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