Dora Vargha
Biographic Data
| ID | 1073798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dora Vargha |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dora |
| FAMILY NAME | Vargha |
| SIGNATURE | VARGHA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0758-5091 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Missing pieces
This essay provides an overview of recent histories of medicine and global health from a socialist perspective, and maps out possible new directions of research. It focuses on key themes in the history of medicine in Eastern Europe, its global connections and Latin American, East Asian and African contexts. Through a discussion of international professional and diplomatic networks, health systems, medical technologies and aid and technical assist…
Vaccination and Pandemics
Vaccines and vaccination are richly explored areas of study within the history of science and medicine, connecting related fields of the history of science and technology, and spanning across subfields such as biomedical sciences, animal studies, colonial and postcolonial history, and the history of global health. Vaccination is a thoroughly political act that is at once an intimate and local issue and a transnational one, with its particular set…
The Pandemic and History
Like many things pandemic, this forum has an appropriately complicated history. In late January 2021, the contributors and I began an online conversation designed to draw out their varied spatial and temporal perspectives in an effort to deepen our understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As we began the conversation, the United States had just recorded twenty-five million COVID-19 cases. More than 414,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to…
Reconsidering the Dramaturgy
This essay reconsiders epidemic narratives through the lens of polio to examine temporal shifts and overlapping and conflicting temporalities and assess some of the stakes in how we conceptualize the epidemic dramaturgy. I argue that while the dramaturgy of epidemics serves as a thread around which people, state actors, and institutions organize experiences, responses, and expectations, consideration of the multiplicity of epidemic temporalities …
Technical assistance and socialist international health
From the establishment of the World Health Organization in 1948, the question of technical assistance was hotly debated by Eastern European countries. Recuperating from the war and undergoing radical political change, they were both recipients and donors of technical assistance in a newly forming system of international health. These countries had specific ideas about the obligations of states and the role of technical aid that did not necessaril…
Epidemic Years
This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this record
Stephen E. Mawdsley, Selling Science
The past few years have been good to those wishing to study the history of polio. The field has recently been enriched with many excellent works: Naomi Rogers’s latest book on Elizabeth Kenny has thrown light on the contested figure of polio treatment, her relationship with the American medical profession and her place in Cold War politics.1 Meanwhile, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs’ exhaustive biography of Jonas Salk has taken us past the well-known s…
Socialist Utopia in Practice
Based on oral history interviews, medical literature, hospital newsletters, memoirs and news media, this article explores the ways in which ideals of socialism interacted with medical practice in polio care in 1950s Hungary. Through the everyday life of polio hospitals, it argues that the specific care that polio demanded from hospital staff, parents and children, resonated with state socialist political discourses of gender equality and the brea…
The Socialist World in Global Polio Eradication
Tandis que l’éradication mondiale de la poliomyélite est le plus souvent associée au « philanthrocapitalisme », le programme a ses racines dans l’Est de la guerre froide. Cet article déplace les débuts de l’éradication de la poliomyélite de trois décennies, et soutient que le vaccin s’est développé dans le cadre de l’internationalisme libéral et des réseaux internationaux socialistes. Fruit d’une collaboration entre Albert Sabin, virologistes sov…
Conclusion
The contributors to this special issue have taken up the challenge of reconsidering some of the fundamental assumptions that have traditionally underpinned the history of internationalism. In doing so their articles (some more explicitly than others) have addressed two central questions: who were the internationalists and where was internationalism taking place? The answers to these questions seem deceptively simple. However, as the articles in t…
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, Jonas Salk
As one of the national heroes of the American twentieth century, Jonas Salk’s name rarely needs an introduction. In the 1950s, polio epidemics were on the rise across the globe, causing paralysis, mainly in children, and generating fear in the summer months when epidemic outbreaks reached their height. Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine offered hope in this public health crisis and the largest clinical trial in history in 1954 promised a solution t…
Between East and West
In 1950s Hungary, with an economy and infrastructure still devastated from World War II and facing further hardships, thousands of children became permanently disabled and many died in the severe polio epidemic that shook the globe. The relatively new communist regime invested significantly in solving the public health crisis, initially importing a vaccine from the West and later turning to the East for a new solution. Through the history of poli…
Heather Green Wooten, The Polio Years in Texas
The history of poliomyelitis in the United States is an especially well researched episode in the twentieth-century history of medicine. The myriad of issues raised by this paralysing virus prompted the publication of a wide range of books and articles in past decades—from histories of national polio research to detailed analyses of individual polio narratives. Heather Green Wooten's new book, The Polio Years in Texas contributes towards a better…
Conclusion
The contributors to this special issue have taken up the challenge of reconsidering some of the fundamental assumptions that have traditionally underpinned the history of internationalism. In doing so their articles (some more explicitly than others) have addressed two central questions: who were the internationalists and where was internationalism taking place? The answers to these questions seem deceptively simple. However, as the articles in t…
The Socialist World in Global Polio Eradication
Tandis que l’éradication mondiale de la poliomyélite est le plus souvent associée au « philanthrocapitalisme », le programme a ses racines dans l’Est de la guerre froide. Cet article déplace les débuts de l’éradication de la poliomyélite de trois décennies, et soutient que le vaccin s’est développé dans le cadre de l’internationalisme libéral et des réseaux internationaux socialistes. Fruit d’une collaboration entre Albert Sabin, virologistes sov…
Socialist Utopia in Practice
Based on oral history interviews, medical literature, hospital newsletters, memoirs and news media, this article explores the ways in which ideals of socialism interacted with medical practice in polio care in 1950s Hungary. Through the everyday life of polio hospitals, it argues that the specific care that polio demanded from hospital staff, parents and children, resonated with state socialist political discourses of gender equality and the brea…
Missing pieces
This essay provides an overview of recent histories of medicine and global health from a socialist perspective, and maps out possible new directions of research. It focuses on key themes in the history of medicine in Eastern Europe, its global connections and Latin American, East Asian and African contexts. Through a discussion of international professional and diplomatic networks, health systems, medical technologies and aid and technical assist…
Vaccination and Pandemics
Vaccines and vaccination are richly explored areas of study within the history of science and medicine, connecting related fields of the history of science and technology, and spanning across subfields such as biomedical sciences, animal studies, colonial and postcolonial history, and the history of global health. Vaccination is a thoroughly political act that is at once an intimate and local issue and a transnational one, with its particular set…
Heather Green Wooten, The Polio Years in Texas
The history of poliomyelitis in the United States is an especially well researched episode in the twentieth-century history of medicine. The myriad of issues raised by this paralysing virus prompted the publication of a wide range of books and articles in past decades—from histories of national polio research to detailed analyses of individual polio narratives. Heather Green Wooten's new book, The Polio Years in Texas contributes towards a better…
Between East and West
In 1950s Hungary, with an economy and infrastructure still devastated from World War II and facing further hardships, thousands of children became permanently disabled and many died in the severe polio epidemic that shook the globe. The relatively new communist regime invested significantly in solving the public health crisis, initially importing a vaccine from the West and later turning to the East for a new solution. Through the history of poli…
Conclusion
The contributors to this special issue have taken up the challenge of reconsidering some of the fundamental assumptions that have traditionally underpinned the history of internationalism. In doing so their articles (some more explicitly than others) have addressed two central questions: who were the internationalists and where was internationalism taking place? The answers to these questions seem deceptively simple. However, as the articles in t…
Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, Jonas Salk
As one of the national heroes of the American twentieth century, Jonas Salk’s name rarely needs an introduction. In the 1950s, polio epidemics were on the rise across the globe, causing paralysis, mainly in children, and generating fear in the summer months when epidemic outbreaks reached their height. Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine offered hope in this public health crisis and the largest clinical trial in history in 1954 promised a solution t…
Stephen E. Mawdsley, Selling Science
The past few years have been good to those wishing to study the history of polio. The field has recently been enriched with many excellent works: Naomi Rogers’s latest book on Elizabeth Kenny has thrown light on the contested figure of polio treatment, her relationship with the American medical profession and her place in Cold War politics.1 Meanwhile, Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs’ exhaustive biography of Jonas Salk has taken us past the well-known s…
Socialist Utopia in Practice
Based on oral history interviews, medical literature, hospital newsletters, memoirs and news media, this article explores the ways in which ideals of socialism interacted with medical practice in polio care in 1950s Hungary. Through the everyday life of polio hospitals, it argues that the specific care that polio demanded from hospital staff, parents and children, resonated with state socialist political discourses of gender equality and the brea…
The Socialist World in Global Polio Eradication
Tandis que l’éradication mondiale de la poliomyélite est le plus souvent associée au « philanthrocapitalisme », le programme a ses racines dans l’Est de la guerre froide. Cet article déplace les débuts de l’éradication de la poliomyélite de trois décennies, et soutient que le vaccin s’est développé dans le cadre de l’internationalisme libéral et des réseaux internationaux socialistes. Fruit d’une collaboration entre Albert Sabin, virologistes sov…
Reconsidering the Dramaturgy
This essay reconsiders epidemic narratives through the lens of polio to examine temporal shifts and overlapping and conflicting temporalities and assess some of the stakes in how we conceptualize the epidemic dramaturgy. I argue that while the dramaturgy of epidemics serves as a thread around which people, state actors, and institutions organize experiences, responses, and expectations, consideration of the multiplicity of epidemic temporalities …
Technical assistance and socialist international health
From the establishment of the World Health Organization in 1948, the question of technical assistance was hotly debated by Eastern European countries. Recuperating from the war and undergoing radical political change, they were both recipients and donors of technical assistance in a newly forming system of international health. These countries had specific ideas about the obligations of states and the role of technical aid that did not necessaril…
Epidemic Years
This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this record
The Pandemic and History
Like many things pandemic, this forum has an appropriately complicated history. In late January 2021, the contributors and I began an online conversation designed to draw out their varied spatial and temporal perspectives in an effort to deepen our understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As we began the conversation, the United States had just recorded twenty-five million COVID-19 cases. More than 414,000 deaths in the U.S. were linked to…
Missing pieces
This essay provides an overview of recent histories of medicine and global health from a socialist perspective, and maps out possible new directions of research. It focuses on key themes in the history of medicine in Eastern Europe, its global connections and Latin American, East Asian and African contexts. Through a discussion of international professional and diplomatic networks, health systems, medical technologies and aid and technical assist…
Vaccination and Pandemics
Vaccines and vaccination are richly explored areas of study within the history of science and medicine, connecting related fields of the history of science and technology, and spanning across subfields such as biomedical sciences, animal studies, colonial and postcolonial history, and the history of global health. Vaccination is a thoroughly political act that is at once an intimate and local issue and a transnational one, with its particular set…
Political science (11 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Politics (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Poliomyelitis (5 works) · Virology (5 works) · World War II (4 works) · Art (3 works)