Do you think the example of rising maternal mortality rates in the U.S. reflects or reinforces Meyers and Hunt’s discussion of ‘the other Global south’? Why or why not?
Do you think the example of rising maternal mortality rates in the U.S. reflects or reinforces Meyers and Hunt’s discussion of ‘the other Global south’? Why or why not?
Social Psychology (10th Edition)
10th Edition
ISBN:9780134641287
Author:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
Publisher:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers
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Do you think the example of rising maternal mortality rates in the U.S. reflects or reinforces Meyers and Hunt’s discussion of ‘the other Global south’? Why or why not?
The meters and hunts discussion is attached.
This is not a writing assignment
Transcribed Image Text:The art of medicine
The other global South
Our story begins with a place. We are standing in front of this is a sticky question, one arising especially upon return
the former United Community Hospital with a visiting from other places with more conventional, though no less
French historian of medicine who works on central_fraught, relationships to global health discourses about
Africa. We gaze up. Along the first floor are massive
metal louvers that stretch the length of the building,
below rows of boarded and broken windows. The modern
five-story hospital is covered in dull metallic siding. Trash
is scattered in the fields that have grown wild around the
building. A rusty patina made by the nearby rail yard and
petroleum refinery covers everything. It's warm and the
sun is setting. The hospital is solitary, as if out of place and
time. "We could be in Kinshasa", Guillaume Lachenal says.
We are in Detroit.
United Community Hospital was the last of several
"black-owned and operated" hospitals in Detroit, the
first established in 1917, and this one built in 1974 after
the merger of several smaller hospitals owned by African
Americans. Originally called Southwest Detroit Hospital,
it was the product of a segregationist past and, in the
1970s, represented a huge political success just after the
city erupted in race riots in 1967, wounds from which were
still raw. Despite the magnitude of need for health care in
the city, the hospital struggled financially during cycles of
econom downturn and competition in an increasingly
integrated health-care marketplace. Eventually it went into
bankruptcy in 1991, and after a few attempts to revive it
the hospital closed in 2006.
Today, the abandoned hospital is not so much a
testament to the slow corrosive power of neglect, but a
vestige of retreat. At the time of its closure, exodus was
speedy-examination rooms still held equipment and
its administrative offices remained filled with personal
effects and scattered files. In one sense, the hospital is
not unlike the countless deserted schools and factories in
this now bankrupt city. These spaces do not simply create
a background to illness and suffering. They are bound up
with representations and experiences of the city as an
environment of injuries. Those Detroiters who remain in
the city's neighbourhoods of decaying buildings and homes
together suggest that suffering is easily objectified and
depersonalised if represented through the city's landscape
of ruins alone, as it so often is by visiting outsiders and
journalists. A closer look at this African American-controlled
hospital complicates any simple view of the city as desolate
and overtaken. The hospital hints at Detroit's uneven
geography of historical and political contingency beyond
the shell of a building and the borders of the city.
disease and calamity in the South. In both hemispheres,
health and survival are profoundly uncertain. In Detroit,
poverty and inequality have helped to fuel astonishing
rates of infant mortality (15 per 1000 livebirths-albeit in
Africa's poorest countries it is over 100 per 1000 livebirths),
low immunisation rates, obesity, high rates of new HIV
infections among African American adolescents, and
one of the highest rates of child homicide per capita in the
USA. When children die at a greater rate than in any other
American city of Detroit's size, to call this situation a public
health emergency is not hyperbole.
One concern is how far such comparisons reach. While a
focus on indicators such as immunisations, malnutrition,
infectious disease, reproductive health, health-care
expenditures, and all-cause mortality help to guide
resource allocation and coalesce sentiment, they do little
to advance an understanding of how epidemiological
accounting keeps an American city like Detroit excluded
from "global health” agendas. Another concern is about
concepts. Illness is but one injury. If entangled with
other forms or situations of lack and insult, injury may be
hard to quantify but even harder to ignore. There is no
question that injuries take a unique, cumulative, physical,
and mental toll on those living in any setting of sustained
economic and social insecurity. We are suggesting that a
focus on specific forms of harm and their consequences is a
valuable analytic starting point for broadening discussions
and practices of global health, beyond ex-colonial worlds in
How should a city like Detroit-and this abandoned
hospital-figure into today's discussions about health in
the global South? For researchers living in and near Detroit, The vacant United Community Hospital, Detroit, USA
www.thelancet.com Vol 384 November 29, 2014
Perspectives
STAE PARKING
1921
Benjamin Beytekin/dpa/Corbis
![the South to precarity throughout the globe. The theorist
of colonial medicine par excellence of the way medical
encounters in such hierarchical milieus were skewed
toward fearful, harmful incongruities-was Frantz Fanon.
The types of harm he described, flowing through lives
and clinics, remain germane to medical care in all kinds of
global locations today.
1922
United Community Hospital could almost be a hospital
in postcolonial Democratic Republic of Congo in the sense
that it emerged from similar architectural and political
norms and shared-and still shares-particular modernist
characteristics. Yet this visual and material rhyming has
the potential to obscure the varied realities of people who
live in and near these clinics in ruins, to dissolve specificity
as well. The actual practices by which poor citizens cope
with decaying infrastructure, collapse, scarcity, and injury
are too often absent from the calculations of health policy,
bioethics, and global humanitarianism. Universalising
poverty misleads and reduces grain, with the everyday
texture of injury perforce not sustained and confronted.
Detroit is always already an uneven landscape where
the terms of health and illness and connectedness and
futures are negotiated each day, not unlike in Kinshasa or
Douala or Ferguson, Missouri, for that matter. Recently, the
suspension of water services for thousands of low-income
households with unpaid utility bills added Detroit to global
conversations about the plight of the poor-so much so
that a United Nations panel called the water shutoffs a
human rights violation, admonishing city government
for attempting to alleviate its financial woes by further
burdening residents. Access to clean, affordable water is
an issue that joins the challenges of providing a sanitary
infrastructure for poor, rich, and the middle class in Detroit,
Delhi, Lagos, and Johannesburg alike.
Further reading
Das V. Affliction: health, disease,
poverty. New York: Fordham
University Press (in press)
Fanon F. The wretched of the
earth, translated by
Richard Philcox. New York:
Grove Press, 2005
Keshavjee S. Blind spot: how
neoliberalism infiltrated global
health. Berkeley: University of
To what end, therefore, is it useful to think of Detroit
as figuring into the ideas and practices of the global
South and of global health? Knowing how to name—and
where to place-Detroit within a global scale highlights
the paucity of words for situations that approximate but
still remain on the periphery of that strange, post-1989,
neoliberal edifice: Global Health. If we consider rates of
disease, of crime and insecurity, of penury and income
inequality, Detroit's participation in the global South
is apparent. Surely the word "health" as much as the
http://somatosphere. misnomer "global" (which, let's not forget, replaced
net/2013/01/kin-porn.html "Third World") requires scrutiny. When the physician
(accessed Nov 18, 2014) and philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem wrote
that health's "existential meaning has been occulted by
the demands of accounting”, he suggested that “health”
often could no longer be found in a guise of life, but only
in its limit within a field of intervention. Health is not only
challenged by illness and harm, but becomes a contest
between its experience and the indices, histories, and
Princeton University Press, 2005 politics that define and shape it.
California Press, 2014
Lachenal G. Kin Porn.
Somatosphere Jan 21, 2013
Schulz AJ, Williams DR, Israel BA,
Lempert LB. Racial and spatial
relations as fundamental
determinants of health in Detroit.
Milbank Q 2002; 80: 677-707
Sugrue TJ. The origins of the
urban crisis: race and inequality
in postwar Detroit. Princeton:
Whether or not Detroit belongs to a set of measures
that make it part of the global South is an open question-
one that should remain so. Indeed, combining the objective
and the subjective enables an appreciation of how race,
poverty, and history produce social injury, pathology, and
political consciousness. Detroiters may understand their
predicaments as stemming from an American history
of racism, riots, white flight, post-industrial ruin, and
neoliberal-engineered bankruptcy, but also as very much
a part of a global history about race, denigration, poverty,
humiliation, and insult.
Maybe every discussion of the global South leads to
contests about "the other global South", or greater and
lesser instantiations of global health. When we speak of
global health-this world of measurements, ambition,
innovation, hierarchies, and sometimes venality-we
would do well to remember it is not limited in practice or
imaginations to formerly colonised worlds, from Africa
to India, from post-Ottoman worlds to Latin America.
Wherever extreme poverty, catastrophe, disaster, and war
enter, those same zones may encounter and often come
to rely on global health knowledge and practices. And
yet as with Hurricane Katrina, the conflict in Syria, or the
aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, the move from emergency
to the everyday tends to turn escalating humanitarian
attentions fickle. Concern fades, alarm quiets. We do not
write to suggest that a particular kind of epidemiology-
critical and social, one underlining the salience of history-
has not already been underway for America's most
compelling metropolis today. Rather, we suggest the merit
of pondering a paradox: Detroit and its precarities should
count as part of the global South, not only in statistical but
also in historical and affective terms, since global health,
injury, violence, and ambivalence are still wrapped up
with each other. Excluding Detroit from such catastrophe
logic, from the well-funded humanitarian gestures that
so often fuel global health efforts, only works to reinforce
North-South asymmetries, to keep them alive-making
Fanon's words just as potent and relevant today as they
were in the colonial situation in which they were written:
"[in medicine] there is always an opposition of exclusive
worlds, a contradictory interaction of different techniques,
a vehement confrontation of values".
*Todd Meyers, Nancy Rose Hunt
Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
48202, USA (TM); and Department of History and Department of
Obstetrics/Gynecology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI,
USA (NRH)
eg1421@wayne.edu
Todd Meyers is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and
the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013). Nancy Rose Hunt
is the author of A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work, Medicalization, and Mobility in the
Congo (Duke University Press, 1999); and A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and
Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke University Press, in press).
www.thelancet.com Vol 384 November 29, 2014](/v2/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcontent.bartleby.com%2Fqna-images%2Fquestion%2Fc809d967-ea19-4090-acce-fa2a8f8d2b36%2Fc6ebba8b-ee7a-4004-ab3d-447eca1a3a8b%2Fzjwb7dz_processed.png&w=3840&q=75)
Transcribed Image Text:the South to precarity throughout the globe. The theorist
of colonial medicine par excellence of the way medical
encounters in such hierarchical milieus were skewed
toward fearful, harmful incongruities-was Frantz Fanon.
The types of harm he described, flowing through lives
and clinics, remain germane to medical care in all kinds of
global locations today.
1922
United Community Hospital could almost be a hospital
in postcolonial Democratic Republic of Congo in the sense
that it emerged from similar architectural and political
norms and shared-and still shares-particular modernist
characteristics. Yet this visual and material rhyming has
the potential to obscure the varied realities of people who
live in and near these clinics in ruins, to dissolve specificity
as well. The actual practices by which poor citizens cope
with decaying infrastructure, collapse, scarcity, and injury
are too often absent from the calculations of health policy,
bioethics, and global humanitarianism. Universalising
poverty misleads and reduces grain, with the everyday
texture of injury perforce not sustained and confronted.
Detroit is always already an uneven landscape where
the terms of health and illness and connectedness and
futures are negotiated each day, not unlike in Kinshasa or
Douala or Ferguson, Missouri, for that matter. Recently, the
suspension of water services for thousands of low-income
households with unpaid utility bills added Detroit to global
conversations about the plight of the poor-so much so
that a United Nations panel called the water shutoffs a
human rights violation, admonishing city government
for attempting to alleviate its financial woes by further
burdening residents. Access to clean, affordable water is
an issue that joins the challenges of providing a sanitary
infrastructure for poor, rich, and the middle class in Detroit,
Delhi, Lagos, and Johannesburg alike.
Further reading
Das V. Affliction: health, disease,
poverty. New York: Fordham
University Press (in press)
Fanon F. The wretched of the
earth, translated by
Richard Philcox. New York:
Grove Press, 2005
Keshavjee S. Blind spot: how
neoliberalism infiltrated global
health. Berkeley: University of
To what end, therefore, is it useful to think of Detroit
as figuring into the ideas and practices of the global
South and of global health? Knowing how to name—and
where to place-Detroit within a global scale highlights
the paucity of words for situations that approximate but
still remain on the periphery of that strange, post-1989,
neoliberal edifice: Global Health. If we consider rates of
disease, of crime and insecurity, of penury and income
inequality, Detroit's participation in the global South
is apparent. Surely the word "health" as much as the
http://somatosphere. misnomer "global" (which, let's not forget, replaced
net/2013/01/kin-porn.html "Third World") requires scrutiny. When the physician
(accessed Nov 18, 2014) and philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem wrote
that health's "existential meaning has been occulted by
the demands of accounting”, he suggested that “health”
often could no longer be found in a guise of life, but only
in its limit within a field of intervention. Health is not only
challenged by illness and harm, but becomes a contest
between its experience and the indices, histories, and
Princeton University Press, 2005 politics that define and shape it.
California Press, 2014
Lachenal G. Kin Porn.
Somatosphere Jan 21, 2013
Schulz AJ, Williams DR, Israel BA,
Lempert LB. Racial and spatial
relations as fundamental
determinants of health in Detroit.
Milbank Q 2002; 80: 677-707
Sugrue TJ. The origins of the
urban crisis: race and inequality
in postwar Detroit. Princeton:
Whether or not Detroit belongs to a set of measures
that make it part of the global South is an open question-
one that should remain so. Indeed, combining the objective
and the subjective enables an appreciation of how race,
poverty, and history produce social injury, pathology, and
political consciousness. Detroiters may understand their
predicaments as stemming from an American history
of racism, riots, white flight, post-industrial ruin, and
neoliberal-engineered bankruptcy, but also as very much
a part of a global history about race, denigration, poverty,
humiliation, and insult.
Maybe every discussion of the global South leads to
contests about "the other global South", or greater and
lesser instantiations of global health. When we speak of
global health-this world of measurements, ambition,
innovation, hierarchies, and sometimes venality-we
would do well to remember it is not limited in practice or
imaginations to formerly colonised worlds, from Africa
to India, from post-Ottoman worlds to Latin America.
Wherever extreme poverty, catastrophe, disaster, and war
enter, those same zones may encounter and often come
to rely on global health knowledge and practices. And
yet as with Hurricane Katrina, the conflict in Syria, or the
aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, the move from emergency
to the everyday tends to turn escalating humanitarian
attentions fickle. Concern fades, alarm quiets. We do not
write to suggest that a particular kind of epidemiology-
critical and social, one underlining the salience of history-
has not already been underway for America's most
compelling metropolis today. Rather, we suggest the merit
of pondering a paradox: Detroit and its precarities should
count as part of the global South, not only in statistical but
also in historical and affective terms, since global health,
injury, violence, and ambivalence are still wrapped up
with each other. Excluding Detroit from such catastrophe
logic, from the well-funded humanitarian gestures that
so often fuel global health efforts, only works to reinforce
North-South asymmetries, to keep them alive-making
Fanon's words just as potent and relevant today as they
were in the colonial situation in which they were written:
"[in medicine] there is always an opposition of exclusive
worlds, a contradictory interaction of different techniques,
a vehement confrontation of values".
*Todd Meyers, Nancy Rose Hunt
Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
48202, USA (TM); and Department of History and Department of
Obstetrics/Gynecology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI,
USA (NRH)
eg1421@wayne.edu
Todd Meyers is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and
the Afterlife of Therapy (University of Washington Press, 2013). Nancy Rose Hunt
is the author of A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Work, Medicalization, and Mobility in the
Congo (Duke University Press, 1999); and A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and
Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke University Press, in press).
www.thelancet.com Vol 384 November 29, 2014
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