Health, Body, and the Profit Motive: Medicine as a Business in History
A free online conference organised by the Historians’ Workshop and the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Economics, to be held live via Zoom
Friday 19 – Saturday 20 November 2021, 5-9pm (JST)
This international conference explores medicine’s co-dependent relationship with business and capitalism. Commentators past and present have viewed medicine as a ‘public good’ that risks becoming inefficient or undersupplied when exposed too much to market competition. However, across different historical and regional contexts, forces of self-interest and the profit motive have consistently shaped matters pertaining to our health and body, often to a surprising degree. In a recent discussion piece in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2020), Christy Ford Chapin points to intersections where both medical historians as well as economic and business historians have, often unknowingly, made huge strides in one another’s research themes. This two-day event aims to identify these intersections and interrogate what they mean to our understanding of medical knowledge and practice.
We welcome a variety of papers that may deal with, but are not necessarily restricted to, the following themes:
- Medicine and health as a business: private health care and insurance, pharmaceuticals, health and fitness products, the wellness industry
- The public-private dynamic in health care systems
- Industry funding of medical research and their epistemological impacts
- Discourses on health and the body in marketing and advertising
- Profit-driven disease risks and health hazards
- Attitudes towards capitalist systems and practices among medical professionals
- History of health economics
- Capitalist medical practices in non-capitalist economies and societies