In a world of growing health inequity and ecological injustice, how do we revitalize medicine and public health to tackle new problems? This groundbreaking collection draws together case studies of social medicine in the Global South, radically shifting our understanding of social science in healthcare. Looking beyond a narrative originating in nineteenth-century Europe, a team of expert contributors explores a far broader set of roots and branches, with nodes in Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Asia. This plural approach reframes and decolonizes the study of social medicine, highlighting connections to social justice and health equity, social science and state formation, bottom-up community initiatives, grassroots movements, and an array of revolutionary sensibilities. As a truly global history, this book offers a more usable past to imagine a new politics of social medicine for medical professionals and healthcare workers worldwide. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter introduces the transformative power of music through the inspiring story of Michael, a young man with epilepsy and mutism who experienced remarkable progress through music therapy. It highlights the growing body of research on music’s therapeutic effects, while acknowledging the challenges of studying music’s impact in a rigorous scientific manner. The author emphasizes the importance of integrating music therapy into healthcare, advocating for policy changes to increase access for those in need. This chapter sets the stage for exploring the multifaceted ways music can enhance our health and well-being, drawing on insights from neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and musicology. It invites readers on a journey to discover the extraordinary potential of music to heal, inspire, and transform lives.

Tracing early Arab-Islamic iterations of women’s rights, this chapter revisits Prophet Muḥammad’s “Farewell Speech” (khuṭbat al-wadā‘), which is often in/directly invoked in vernacular discourses to structure arguments for women’s rights. Situating this speech within a discourse on equality and positive/negative rights and obligations, this chapter sheds light on early Arab(ic)-Islamic discourses on women’s rights and uses the concept of vernacular rhetoric of human rights to draw attention to more recent iterations of women’s rights. The chapter fast-forwards to a speech on women’s rights by Malak-Hifnī Nāṣif (1886–1918), Egyptian writer, intellectual, and reformer, whose pen name is Bāhithat al-Bādīyah. She proposed ten articles to promote women’s rights, including marital and epistemic rights. Finally, the chapter moves to 2019 and the highly publicized Arab Charter on Women’s Rights launched by the Federal National Council of the United Arab Emirates in conjunction with the Arab Parliament. The chapter uses these three iterations of women’s rights to underline key topoi of (women’s) rights discourse.

This chapter introduces a fundamental aspect of attention that is beginning to be understood at a deeper level because of neuroscience research. In addition to how attention is allocated at one instant in time, new research is showing that there are temporal limits to attention and that a complete understanding of attention requires understanding the timing of attention. The “attentional blink” phenomenon is discussed, along with neuroscience evidence linking attention and consciousness. The brain mechanisms of attending to time are compared to those involved in attending to space and to static properties of objects. This chapter also explores the relation between attention and memory, highlighting the holding of attention. The factors that determine attentional dwell time, and the brain regions affecting this type of control are introduced. Classic and modern theories of the role of rhythms in the brain are discussed, and evidence from fMRI, ERPs, and single-unit recordings are presented that provide evidence for internally generated versus externally triggered rhythms in the alpha, beta, theta, and gamma frequency bands. The importance of neural entrainment and the synchrony of neural activity within and across brain regions is discussed, in relation to its role in attentional control and conscious processing.

This chapter draws on a tradition of work on geographies of the sensory and the embodied to develop a reading of Tracy Chevalier’s novel The Last Runaway as a case study in sensory literary geography. It reads the text as both the story of a Quaker immigrant set in a fictional nineteenth-century Ohio and as the story of that setting embodied in the experiences of a fictional Quaker settler. The first half of the chapter provides a brief outline of the kind of literary geography practiced in this reading, emphasising in particular its interest in the inseparability of geographies, events, and characters as they function in the creation of fictional worlds. It highlights four aspects to this way of reading: first, its framing within the theory and practice of literary geography; second, its interest in the idea of ‘spatiality’; third, the idea that an understanding of spatiality as the spatial-social might prompt a rethinking of the narrative category of setting; and, finally, its grounding in work on embodied and sensory geographies. The second half of the chapter then explores in detail how Chevalier’s narrative style enables her to articulate the human geography of The Last Runaway through embodied human-scale sensory experiences.

The chapter resituates the ideas of empire and nation in relation to the category of space. It delineates the centrality of the concept of space for understanding the imperial and contemporary world-system and the development of colonial capitalist modernity. Drawing on theorists that include but are not limited to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Henri Lefebvre, Nikos Poulantzas, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said, the chapter seeks to understand how their works engage with space as a critical concept, and how their theorizations deploy the category of space to illuminate the production of new kinds – and conceptions – of space in colonial capitalist modernity: the metropole and the colony; notions of the core, periphery, and the semiperiphery; and the modern world-system as a concatenation of spaces – that is, a set of contiguous and nominally equal nation-states separated out from each other through the novel spatial form of the border. The chapter also examines theorizations of the nation to underline it as an ideology of space.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

The chapter summarizes previous chapters, presents a view of the status quo of the discipline, and looks forward to the future. If we are in an era in which translating is becoming increasingly machine aided, by increasingly ’skilled’ mechanisms, then translators will be enabled to manage the increasing demands on their time of an increasingly interconnected world.

This chapter is a reflection on three intellectual moves that tend to be revealing and influential in English-speaking philosophy, set in an autobiographical context. One move is to apply a new method to an issue that has been treated for a long time in other ways. A second is to look for data that are not entailed or adequately explained by existing theories and then to develop a theory that accounts for them while also making sense of data for which existing theories can account. The third is to find an assumption common to two long-standing disputants and advance an alternative to them both that does not rely on it. This essay includes strategic advice for budding philosophers who might want to take such approaches to their work.

Despite the influence of key figures like Henry Sigerist and the Rockefeller Foundation, social medicine achieved a formal presence at only a handful of medical schools in the US, partly reflecting the political context in which “social medicine” was often heard as “socialized medicine.” Work that might otherwise have been called social medicine had to pass under other names. Does “social medicine” in the US only include those who self-identified with social medicine or does it include people who worked in the spirit of social medicine? Beginning with the recognized work of Sigerist and the Rockefeller, we then examine several Black social theorists whose work can now be recognized as social medicine. The Cold War context challenged would-be proponents of social medicine but different threads endured. The first, clinically oriented, focused on community health. The second, based in academic departments, applied the interpretive social sciences to explore the interspace between the clinical and the social. These threads converged in the 1990s and 2000s in new forms of social medicine considered as healthcare committed to social justice and health equity.

The chapter sheds fresh light on Aristotle’s account of perception by providing a novel analysis of the puzzles that he articulates within his discussion of the predecessors’ views, especially in An. 1. I argue that Aristotle takes the key insight of the traditional view that like is perceived by like to be expressed in the idea that the perceiver is like the perceptual object by which she is being affected. This idea seems inconsistent with the widely shared assumption that only unlike things can act upon each other. Aristotle’s predecessors were unable to resolve this tension (the notion of a generic likeness is of no help), but he believes that precisely this tension must be resolved by any successful account of what perception is. The only predecessor who at least hinted towards a resolution is Anaxagoras with his account of impassive nous (understood by Aristotle as a general account of cognition). But Anaxagoras failed to account for the causal aspects of cognition as a way of being affected by its object. Aristotle’s own account can be seen as an attempt to incorporate the true insights of both the view that in perception like is affected by like and the view that what perceives must be impassive.

This chapter explores the intricate neural processes that occur when we listen to music, highlighting the brain’s vast network activation. Research reveals that even non-musicians possess implicit musical knowledge, evident in their brain’s response to ’right’ and ’wrong’ chords, similar to how we process language. The author shares personal experiences conducting EEG studies, demonstrating how music activates similar brain regions for both musicians and non-musicians. This challenges the notion of being ’unmusical’, emphasizing that everyone has an innate musical capacity. Studies with toddlers further reveal an early understanding of musical grammar, indicating a biological predisposition for recognizing and learning musical structures. This innate sense of music is not limited to formal training but develops through everyday exposure. The chapter underscores the universal nature of music perception, with research showing toddlers and even individuals from remote cultures with no prior exposure to Western music responding to its emotional nuances. This reinforces the idea that music is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and experience, accessible to all.

This chapter unpacks the complex nature of emotions, highlighting their multifaceted components: activity in affect systems, physiological changes, evaluations, motivations, attention, memory, and expression. The feeling cortex integrates these signals to form emotional percepts, shaping our subjective experiences. The chapter details the four biological components of feelings: affective, somatic, motor, and cognitive. It emphasizes the role of interoception, the perception of bodily states, in emotional awareness and well-being. Additionally, it explores the concept of emotional resonance, where music surpasses language in conveying emotions. Finally, the chapter examines the interplay between emotions and consciousness, explaining how conscious thought can influence and regulate our emotional responses. It underscores that understanding this complex interplay is crucial for harnessing music’s power to enhance emotional balance and well-being.