Medicalising Borders: Selection, Containment and Quarantine Since 1800

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Description

The research of pandemics, epidemics, and pathogens like COVID-19 reaches far beyond the scope of biomedicine. Not only an objective for the health, political and social sciences, epidemics and pandemics are a matter of geography: foci and vectors of communicable diseases continue to test the efficacy of medical control at state borders.

This volume explores historical models of quarantine, spatial isolation and detention as precautionary means against the dissemination of disease and contagion by border crossers, migrants and refugees. Uniquely, this volume shows that the current border security regimes of Western states exhibit a high share of medicalised techniques of power, which originate both in European modernity and developed during the last quarter of the millennium. Drawing on the collective expertise of a network of international researchers, this interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for those wishing to understand the medicalisation of borders.

Reviews

'Medicalizing Borders makes it abundantly clear that medicine cannot play Pontius Pilatus and wash its hands in innocence.'
Leo van Bergen, Leiden University Medical Centre, Medicine, Conflict and Survival

Author Bio

Sevasti Trubeta is a researcher at the Institute of Childhood Studies, University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal; Christian Promitzer is a researcher at the Institute for History, University of Graz; Paul Weindling is Wellcome Trust Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University.