Global Histories of Social Medicine: Usable Pasts for an Untenable Present
Seminar Series: Embedded Advocacy in Medicine & Health
Dra. Anne Kveim Lie and el Dr. Jeremy Greene
In this talk, we discuss the plural histories of social medicine as a site of practical engagement between social science, clinical care, and community health advocacy in the modern world. There is no single definition of social medicine, a vital and pragmatic field that has been invented and re-invented in many different times and places. Instead, we present its multiple origins and trajectories across very different politics and economies of health as an opportunity to explore what advocacy can mean in community health, clinical practice, and even the basic sciences of medical education. This talk draws on our recently released book, Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine (Cambridge University Press, 2025), co-edited with Warwick Anderson, which weaves together a variety of intersecting narratives of social medicine and health advocacy in colonial and postcolonial contexts, involving authors, actors, and analytics from around the world. Social medicine has often been marginalized in (and sometimes opposed to) biomedical systems, but we argue that it must also be understood as a critique of medicine from within, or as an embedded advocacy by those actors within the medical profession who emphasize the ineradicable relevance of the social world in medical education, research, practice, and policy. In a world of widening global health inequalities and depleted public health services, we need a revived social medicine more than ever; we offer a usable past for social medicine in order to imagine alternate futures from this alarming and oppressive moment.
Jointly organized by the Program on Medical History, Ethics & Politics (MHEP), Faculty of Medicine, American University of Beirut (AUB), and the Medical Anthropology Research Center (MARC), Department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Social Work, Rovira i Virgili University (URV).
Tuesday, November 11, 2025, 17-19h (Lebanon) / 16-18h (Spain)
