יום ב' 17.03.2008 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 449 בנין גילמן

במסגרת קולוקוויום בר הילל

Professor George Weisz,
McGill University

Reinventing Chronic Disease in the 20th Century

Commentator: Otniel Dror, The Hebrew Univeristy

התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:30, חדר 450
ההרצאה תינתן בשפה האנגלית!

The term "chronic" has existed for many centuries as a descriptive term for illnesses that unfold slowly, in contrast to acute diseases which either kill people or are cured relatively quickly. But in the early 20th century, we argue in this talk, "chronic disease" took on an entirely new meaning; it was reframed as a social problem that demanded significant reform of health care institutions. It has been argued by some historians that this development was a natural response to what has been called the "demographic transition"-that the decline in infectious diseases, allowed chronic diseases to assume new significance. While this view has some validity, it ignores the fact that the process occurred almost exclusively in the United States until about 1950 when it was launched on a very small scale in Britain as part of an effort to deal with the problems of the elderly. The term has never assumed any significance in France. In this talk I shall try to explain why the term emerged as a useful category of thought and action for certain groups in the health arena between 1920 and 1940 and how "objective" data was produced that confirmed the existence of a "chronic disease plague". It will be argued that the term emerged in two domains where it meant rather different things. The first was the social welfare domain seeking to cope with the health problems of the indigent poor. The second involved public health agencies whose representatives dreamed of moving beyond the routine work of communicable disease prevention and becoming full partners with the medical profession in preventing and curing "all the ills of mankind". The meaning of the term continued to evolve during the post-war period as new groups appropriated the term for their own use.

George Weisz is Cotton-Hannah Chair for the History of Medicine at McGill University. His most recent books are Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specialization, 1830-1950 (2006) and, as co-editor, Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives // La Quantification m?dicale, perspectives historiques et sociologiques (2005).