Colonial Medicine & Its Legacies
This describes how colonial medicine shaped future public health through mistrust and trauma.
Colonial medicine often caused trauma, leading to long-term distrust of public health authorities.
This metric allows comparison of disease burden across populations and conditions.
DALYs (Disability Adjusted Life Year)
This reading argues that health data is often incomplete and shaped by political, social, and technical factors.
Birn, Pillay, and Holtz (2009) “What Do We Know, What Do We Need to Know, and Why it Matters—Data on Health”
This type of cause is required for a disease to occur, such as TB exposure.
Necessary cause
This condition discussed by Alex Nading affects agricultural workers and is linked to heat stress and labor conditions rather than traditional causes.
CKDnt (Chronic Kidney Disease of nontraditional causes)
This explains how colonial land distribution increased disease spread like malaria.
Non-immune populations were moved into high-disease areas, increasing transmission and mortality.
This concept describes how the Smallpox Eradication Program exercised power over populations.
Biopower through coercive vaccination, surveillance, and movement control.
This concept from Joel Best explains why we should ask how numbers are produced, not just accept them.
Social construction of statistics
These are examples of how environmental exposure affects the body over time.
Lead exposure in Peru, burn pits, CKDnt
This concept describes how war reshapes environments in ways that produce long-term health effects, such as birth defects or toxic exposure.
War ecologies
These are examples of structural violence under colonial rule.
British diversion of famine relief in India, cordon sanitaire policies, and displacement of Indigenous populations away from resources.
This distinction compares broad vs. targeted approaches to healthcare systems.
Primary Health Care (PHC) focuses on broad health needs, while Selective PHC targets measurable interventions.
This example shows how a small estimate about bird deaths became exaggerated into a widely cited statistic.
Best’s bird-window collision estimate growing into “1 billion birds.”
This theory, developed by Nancy Krieger, explains how social inequalities and environmental exposures become biologically expressed in the body.
Ecosocial theory
According to Knowles, why should disasters not be considered purely “natural” events?
Social, political, and infrastructural conditions shape their impacts.
This term describes how colonial authorities used sanitation to control populations.
Sanitation syndrome
This term describes the era in which humans became the dominant force shaping the environment.
Anthropocene
According to Claire L. Wendland, why should we be cautious when interpreting maternal mortality ratios in places like Malawi?
They are often based on estimates, incomplete data, and modeling rather than direct counts.
This argument critiques treating asthma only as an individual condition.
Alison Kenner argues asthma must be understood as both environmental and biological, not just individual.
According to Nading, why is the plantation considered a “hotspot” for global health concerns?
It concentrates environmental harm, labor exploitation, and scientific attention in one place.
This describes how colonial powers engaged with African healing knowledge.
Some rejected it, while others used it without credit or meaningful collaboration.
These three frameworks differ in how they define the scale and focus of health interventions.
Global health (transnational equity), international health (between nations), planetary health (environment–health connection)
According to Durand, why can large estimates of climate migrants be problematic for understanding migration?
They oversimplify complex causes of migration and can shape misleading or fear-based political narratives.
Why is the concept of embodiment important for understanding health inequalities?
It shows how social and environmental inequalities become biologically incorporated into the body over time.
This concept is difficult to address because harm occurs gradually and is hard to trace to a single cause.
Slow violence