This chapter analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how they translated into social policy. It argues that Latin American social medicine was a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) (regionally) and Brazilian Association of Collective Health (in Brazil, ABRASCO). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism.

The second wave of Latin American social medicine overlaps with the turmoil of the Cold War as the region experienced processes of anti-communism, military coups, and state violence. A landmark in its history is the establishment of the Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) in 1984, which today represents the longest-standing transnational organization in the field regionally, exploring the social basis of population health from a leftist political tradition. The association’s account of its origin points to Juan Cesar Garcia and his team at the Pan-America Health Organization (PAHO) as centralizing figures that guided the second wave to new grounds of internationalism. According to the collective, Garcia and the PAHO’s Department of Human Resources helped connect a scattered group of leftist scholars throughout the region’s public universities into the so-called Latin American social medicine Network, enabling a fruitful exchange of ideas and principles that continue to this day.

Jewish modernity in Europe began with Hebrew, the ancient language of the Jews. Intellectuals like Moses Mendelssohn used Biblical Hebrew to introduce Jews to modern, secular European culture and disseminate the ideas of the Enlightenment among them. This odd choice had two advantages. Hebrew was familiar to many Jewish men and the Biblical version used by Jewish intellectuals was also proof of the ancient heritage of the Jews. But if Hebrew was a kind of cultural affectation for enlightened Jews, after the rise of Zionism and the establishment of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, it became a necessity and a vehicle for forming a new Jewish nation there.

This chapter traces social medicine to Shibli Shumayyil, a medical doctor and key figure of the Nahḍa, an intellectual and cultural movement that spanned from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. He envisioned social medicine as a tool for social reform, diagnosing its social ills, and proposing a cure. Shumayyil and his successors rejected the colonial justification of social medicine, instead promoting social medicine as a means to free people from all kinds of oppression, ignorance, and injustice. Throughout the twentieth century until today, as poverty, authoritarianism, and social conflicts escalated in the Arab world, doctors increasingly became advocates for the marginalized, the poor, and the oppressed. The chapter examines the work of several revolutionary doctors in Tunisia, Sudan, and Egypt, who used their practice as a form of protest, praxis, and critique. Not only did these doctors embody the meaning that Guérin originally gave to social medicine but they also incorporated Shumayyil’s idea of medicine as a form of progressive clinical sociology.

Zionists wanted to develop their own musical sound, folk as well as art or so-called classical music. They approached it in a number of ways that were inspired by romantic nationalism again. They went “back to the people” and recorded the musical traditions of various Jewish communities from around the world, primarily from non European Jewish communities, which were considered more authentic and closer to ancient Judaistic musical traditions. They also reinterpreted musical traditions from Eastern Europe, from whence most of them came. The attempt to bind together East and West characterized early Zionist musical creations, which often included lyrics in Biblical and rabbinic Hebrew that emphasized the nation’s ancient pedigree.

In the middle of the twentieth century, “social medicine” manifested in Australia largely through its proxies and surrogates, which included tropical medicine, Aboriginal health, colonial health (in Papua New Guinea and parts of the Pacific), pediatrics, geriatrics, and some non-institutional aspects of psychiatry. These fields often emphasized socioeconomic drivers of disease emergence and social or political solutions to population health problems. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were few overt advocates for social medicine. From the 1970s, radical politicians and public health leaders began to support nationwide projects in social medicine and community health, influenced by similar schemes elsewhere, as well as strong local campaigns for women’s health, sexual health, Indigenous health, and worker’s health. The goal was to “develop” communities through interdisciplinary centers (including social workers, nurses, mental health workers, and sometimes medical doctors), embedded in and engaging with local structures and leadership. We explore what distinctive (and perhaps contrasting) concepts of human collectivity are implied by social medicine and community health.

Zionists wanted to reshape Jewish culture in the spirit of modern nationalism. They based their national vision on Jewish history and Jewish tradition but gave both a thoroughly modern interpretation. Instead of hiding their difference to ease their assimilation into the greater, non-Jewish society, they emphasized Jewish difference by giving it a distinct cultural character. They began by writing modern literature in Hebrew, their ancient language, and eventually turned Hebrew into a spoken language, the vernacular of their emerging national community. They organized the land they bought and settled in Palestine in new ways that expressed their revolutionary social and communal values and built new kinds of houses on it. Their new occupations as farmers, builders, and then soldiers reshaped their bodies, the clothes they wore, and the way the carried themselves. They renewed their festival calendar to celebrate and commemorate their innovations, and they developed new aesthetic sensibilities in visual art and music that expressed their cultural revolution in more abstract ways.

The barefoot-doctor scheme in rural China during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 was a synonym for social medicine in the People’s Republic of China. This chapter examines how sociopolitical, disease, and economic factors contributed to the development of the barefoot-doctor program and shaped the unique path of social medicine in China. It analyzes how the government clarified and addressed the dilemma between ideological equity and structural inequity. Furthermore, it discusses how disease models both facilitated and challenged the barefoot-doctor program and impacted on social medicine, and investigates how the changing roles and function of barefoot doctors has impacted social medicine in the evolution of community medicine. The barefoot doctors echoed the themes of social medicine in developing and developed countries and left its inspirations and legacies. By revisiting the state’s role in the barefoot-doctor program, the chapter provides a new understanding of the global history of social medicine in the twentieth century and beyond.

Under the umbrella of solidarity missions, since the early 1960s, Cuba’s socialist government has dispatched tens of thousands of medical brigades to geographically diverse locales. This approach to humanitarian medical aid, according to the Cuban government, is an act of solidarity grounded in an ethos of social justice. The magnitude of this brand of humanitarianism far outpaces the most iconic faces of the contemporary global health industry. Despite these important if not groundbreaking roles in primary healthcare, for most readers in North America and Europe, Cuba likely occupies the rhetorical and discursive space of the singular “case study” or “alternative,” if it even makes an appearance. How do we understand the absence–presence of Cuba’s medical-internationalism efforts as a non-event in the global health landscape? This chapter explores the structuring logics shaping global health’s dominant script – the problematics, concepts, methods, and practices – that render different imaginaries of care and aid illegible, thus unthinkable.

In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.