HISTORY ON THE EDGE: SOCIALIZING MEDICINE, MAKING MEDICINE SOCIAL: EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE, SOCIALIST EXPERTISE AND COLD WAR KNOWLEDGE CIRCULATION
You are kindly invited to a new lecture in the History on the Edge series, which will take place on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at the INZ premises or via the ZOOM link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85093074535?pwd=chFdSCgScVg8fw1djh3bVz8h9gqWtm.1 . In the new season, lectures will take place at 3 p.m. and if you will be joining us in person, you are welcome to a coffee 20 minutes before the lecture begins.
The lecture will be given by José Luis Aguilar López-Barajas, and the title of the lecture is “Socializing Medicine, Making Medicine Social: East-Central Europe, Socialist Expertise and Cold War Knowledge Circulation”. The lecture will be held in English.
Socializing Medicine, Making Medicine Social: East-Central Europe, Socialist Expertise and Cold War Knowledge Circulation
This lecture will provide a sociology of Cold War knowledge circulation, situating socialist medical expertise at the centre. I will frame socialist East-Central Europe as a strategic space able to take advantage of the Nylon Curtain, mediating between knowledge produced in the Soviet Union and the West while at the same time developing its own original approaches to medicine. What matters is not so much the roots of knowledge but the routes it followed. I will argue that these routes passed through socialist East-Central Europe, and that experts from the region left an imprint on medicine that later became influential internationally, including in Western Europe and in organizations such as the WHO. But how socialist was socialist medicine? I will address this question by showing the specific and original ways in which East-Central European experts integrated social and gender dimensions into medicine. Consequently, when their expertise gained international recognition, it did so not in spite of, but because of its socialist component. To illustrate my points, I will sketch three topics in which socialist experts became pioneers internationally: childcare medicine, medical sociology, and mental health and time-budget studies.