Migrants, Minorities, and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies

Lara Marks, Michael Worboys

Routledge, 1997 - History - 299 pages

Looking at a number of migrant and minority groups from around the world, this book examines how health issues and the construction of medical ideas have interacted with developing ideas of ethnicity and race.Migrants, Minorities and Health explores the relations between medicine and the minorities in the twentieth century. The contributors present both historical and contemporary studies of migrant and minority groups from societies around the world in order to examine how health issues have interacted with ideas of ethnicity and race.The essays collected here explore the historical origins and contemporary power of stereotypical views - of immigrants as importers of disease, for instance, or of minorities as sources of infection in the host society. The authors show how ideas of ethnicity and race have shaped, and have in turn been influenced by, the construction of medical ideas.Challenging common assumptions about migrants, minorities and health, this collection brings together new perspectives from a variety of disciplines. It will make fascinating reading for social historians, medical historians and social policy makers.

About the author

LARA MARKS is a visiting senior research associate at Cambridge University and an honorary senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Michael Worboys, professor of history of science, technology and medicine at the University of Manchester, is known for his work on the history of colonial science, tropical medicine, communicable diseases, and bacteriology and is currently researching animals and medicine.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Migrants, Minorities, and Health: Historical and Contemporary Studies; Volume 2 of Studies in the social history of medicine
• Editors: Lara Marks, Michael Worboys
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Routledge, 1997
• ISBN: 0415112133, 9780415112130
• Length: 299 pages
• Subjects: History / General; Medical / Public Health