The Royal Asiatic Society is very pleased to welcome Prof. Sanjoy Bhattacharya (University of York) to deliver the first lecture of 2013 on Thursday 10th January - 'Bhutan's Smallpox Eradication Programme: International Health and the Limits of Global Influence'.
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WHO PHOTO 10984. The WHO smallpox vaccination team at work in Bodnath, a famous place of pilgrimage in the Kathmandu Valley. Image used with kind permission of the WHO. |
Prof. Bhattacharya is the Director of the Centre of Global Health Histories and a Professor in the History of Medicine at York. He specialises in the medical, environmental, political and social history of nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia, as well as the history of international and global health programmes. He is very involved in the WHO's Global Health Histories project since it began in 2004. His work connects history and policy, explores inter-disciplinary perspectives in medical history and humanities and offers independent and critical assessments of global health policy. Prof. Bhattacharya is the editor of Medical History published by Cambridge University Press, with support from the Wellcome Trust.
In summary of his talk Prof. Bhattacharya writes:
Histories of the global smallpox eradication programme and its national chapters have tended to focus on the larger national formations in Africa and Asia. The choice of subject is justified by chroniclers by the fact that these locations contributed a major share of the world's annual tally of variola, which ensured that agencies such as the United States' Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) paid a lot of attention to working with national and local governments on anti-smallpox campaigns. Such historiographical trends have led to the marginalisation of the histories of smallpox eradication programmes in smaller nations, which are either presented as peripheral in a heroic trope or unaffected by sustained, organised activities. Using the case study of Bhutan, a small Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between India and China, an effort is made to reclaim its contributions to the global smallpox eradication programme, to examine the limited powers of agencies such as the WHO and CDC, to assess the role of Indian government influence and, not least, provide a rare, carefully researched insight into the healthcare profiles in this isolated nation in the 1970s. This, in turn, allows us to propose new ways of looking at the intricate links between national, international and global health programmes, as they were conceptualised and run in different locales in the period after the Second World War.
The lecture starts at 6pm, is free and all are welcome, it will be followed by a question and answer session and a drinks reception. For more information contact info@royalasiaticsociety.org and for directions to the society visit our website.