Roberta Bivins - Prompting critical reflection on medical responses to migration

History & Policy

Roberta Bivins (Warwick): 'Stop reinventing the Wheel: Prompting critical reflection on medical responses to migration'

Today, migration is framed as a crisis, and often one of unprecedented scale, complexity and diversity. Yet from a historian's perspective, neither this language nor the phenomena described by it are novel. Globally, the second half of the twentieth century was characterised by mass movements of population. Moreover, medical practices and ideas about 'good' citizenship and 'good' behaviour have been integral to state management of both migrant populations and the ethnic communities that emerged as migrants became citizens and stakeholders.

In theory, then, national and international organisations should be able to mobilise fifty years of clinical and public health experience with migrant and ethnic populations. Yet this valuable resource is rarely tapped, or even recognised, by those newly charged with each successive 'crisis'. The outcomes -- positive or negative -- of previous interventions are lost to those who accidentally repeat them. I have found that historical case studies showcasing past experience as a resource for present decision-makers are valued as direct and translatable evidence by workers in the field.

Roberta Bivins is a historian of medicine at the University of Warwick. Her first two books examined the cross-cultural transmission of medical expertise, particularly in relation to global and alternative medicine (Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine, 2000 and Alternative Medicine? A History, 2007). Since 2004, funded by the Wellcome Trust, she has studied the impacts of immigration and ethnicity on post-war British health, medical research and practice. In 2015, she published findings from this work as a book, Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration and the NHS in Post War Britain. With Mathew Thomson, she is now exploring the culture and effects of Britain’s National Health Service in the UK and internationally since 1948.