Mission Statement
Cultures of Health: A Historical Anthology is a website dedicated to making available to students and researchers an eclectic mix of sources to stimulate historical conversations about the cultural dimensions of disease, health and medicine. The site is designed to be especially suited for the presentation and discussion of research “fragments” — a venue for graduate students and senior undergraduates, as well as more established researchers, to present and discuss ideas and sources that are not yet worked into the complex, finished “whole” of paper, article, thesis, or book.
My primary agenda is Latin America from 1800 to the present, with emphasis on the trans-national circulation of institutions, characters, dialogues, and practices – what is often understood under the rubric of “international health” or “global health”. When it came time to define the geographical and temporal limits of this web-based anthology, however, I decided not to confine it to the Americas, or to the modern period. This site is an experiment, and intended to be ecumenical – to generate a discussion and a community that will lead where it may.There didn’t seem any point in limiting it before it got going. So, at least in its infancy, eclecticism will be the order of the day: this anthology will present sources of any kind relating to cultures of health and medicine anywhere, anytime, as long as they are historically contextualized.
Many of the initial postings will be on subjects currently the focus of my own investigations and those of the University of Windsor graduate students working on similar themes, but I sincerely hope that the site will expand to take in the work of other contributors who feel that their material could find a home on the Cultures of Health site.
The linked Cultures of Health Digital Collections has been developed to showcase and make available to the public the results of work carried out under the auspices of the Canada Research Chair in the History of International Health at the University ofWindsor, and to provide a site where any interested researcher in the field of history of medicine and health could make available to the public more extensive data series to facilitate research.
Researchers who would like to make material available in the anthology and/or the digital collections are welcome to submit a brief proposal to the Cultures of Health editorial board. The material will be clearly and unequivocally attributed to the contributor, and the contributor will retain copyright. The site will conform to the Creative Commons mode of licensing electronic publication.
Material will be posted in the language in which it is generated or submitted, accompanied by a brief English abstract, and we will do our best to make the site infrastructure available in as many languages as possible.
Thank you for your interest and please join in.
Steven Palmer
Canada Research Chair in History of International Health
Department of History
University of Windsor
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files and any other original works), is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
