Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science: featuring Julia Cummiskey

The Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science series engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book.
For the first event in February, we are delighted to welcome Julia Cummiskey to share her book Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global. This book, which presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), a biomedical center founded in 1936, challenges assumptions about global health as an enterprise dominated by researchers based in the Global North and recenters the history of biomedicine in Africa. She will be joined in conversation by Dr. Svea Closser, associate professor in International Health: Social and Behavioral Interventions.
This event is open to the public, and we encourage you to come even if it's your first time joining for this event series!

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Julia Cummiskey earned her MPH from Columbia University in 2007 and her PhD in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University in 2017.

From her website: "My current project explores the changing ideas about health communication in modern East Africa from top-down organized campaigns to commercial product promotion and informal channels for spreading information and misinformation. Tentatively titled Selling Health, this book will explore the different forms of communication that have been used to shape the Africans’ behaviors and consumption of products intended to (or purporting to) improve health in the 20th and 21st centuries. Combining history of medicine, African history, and business history, this project will examine the strategies used by pharmaceutical companies, makers of medical devices, providers of medical services, and public health marketing campaigns to promote the consumption of goods and services in the name of health. To understand how recent developments in social marketing and health communication fit into the longer history of efforts to improve the health of people in the Global South, I investigate how different parties have attempted to “sell” health and products, services, or behavior changes that increase health, to people in East Africa at different times in modern history. These campaigns shed light on changing ideas about health, gender, race, and class, among other things. Ultimately, the project will interrogate different imaginations of what constituted healthy life in Africa, who had the authority to define it, who was responsible for delivering it, and who had the opportunity to attain it in different places and moments in time. My work combines archival practices, oral histories, and participant observation and I am especially interested in collaborative projects with anthropologists, public health practitioners, historians, and other researchers, especially those based in Africa."

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