DHM

Unpacking the Emergency Health Kit of international humanitarian medical aid 1978–90: How humanitarian standards and supply chains became global

The paper explores how Emergency Health Kits (EHKs), introduced between 1978 and 1990, transformed international humanitarian medical aid.

Approval delays in multi-country COVID-19 trials: the case of COPCOV and the risk of therapeutic inertia

This paper, by Janelle Winters and Williams HK Schilling, looks at delays in approving the COPCOV trial—a large, international study led by the University of Oxford. It explains how bureaucracy and regulations slowed the trial and suggests ways to improve research during health emergencies.

Humanitarian Medicine and Organizations

Encyclopedia entry to the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society by PI Professor Taithe on Humanitarian Medicine and Organizations.

Forthcoming book: Humanitarian handicraft

This book uncovers the overlooked history of artisanal textiles in projects aimed at social uplift and moral reform. The contributors ask what the implications of this form of gendered craft production are for our understanding of the humanitarian imagination, relations of humanitarian production and the generation of meaning and social and artistic value. It also opens a dialogue with contemporary socially-engaged textile artists to engender critical reflection on the socially-situated meaning of textile craft in past and present humanitarian contexts.

Book Publication: Medical care, humanitarianism and intimacy in the long Second World War, 1931-1953

This book explores underexamined sites of interactions and encounters between humanitarians and medical workers during the long Second World War (1931-1953).It traces circulations of humanitarian actors, knowledge, and practices across the world from a conflict to another. In doing so, it demonstrates that the conflict brought about unlikely aid coalitions and intimate networks of aid, and led to a transformation of the relationships between some European organisations and colonial 'peripheries', leading to the emergence of new activities and actors.

Journal Article: Making Hepatitis C History?

This article investigates how a medical non-governmental organisation Médecins sans frontières (MSF) developed and promoted the treatment of Hepatitis C (HCV) in Cambodia. The article argues that such a campaign represents a new development for the history of humanitarian medicine. As an experimental historical project, we aimed to capture how a humanitarian organisation defined its intervention as a ‘proof of concept’ and developed a public health campaign from a vertical approach reliant on new and very effective treatments. This article is also available in French: https://msf-crash.org/fr/medecine-et-sante-publique/lhepatite-c-entre-dans-lhistoire-medecins-sans-frontieres-lhepatite-c-et

Journal Article: Making Hepatitis C History?