While bioethicist Arthur Caplan claims that "The Nazi analogy is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in ethical battles about science and medicine", we claim that such total exclusion of this analogy is equally problematic. Our analysis builds on Roberto Esposito's conceptualization of immunitas and communitas as key elements of biopolitics. Within public health theories and practices there is an inherent tension between exclusion (immunitas) and inclusion (communitas) forces.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArgumentThis paper focuses on the Jewish nursing profession in Poland during the interwar period. We argue that the integration of Jewish women in medical activity under the AJDC (American Jewish Distribution Committee) and TOZ (Towarzystwa Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej [the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish People]) emerged in Poland less from the adoption of gender equality and more out of necessity. On the one hand, JDC and TOZ needed Jewish nurses and public health nurses to carry out their health campaigns and build a public health infrastructure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe examine the creation and functioning of the "Pasteur Institute in Palestine" focusing on the relationship between biological science, health policy, and the creation of a "new society" within the framework of Zionism. Similar to other bacteriological institutes founded by colonial powers, this laboratory was developed in response to public health needs. But it also had a political role.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper follows the social and political history of OZE, the Society for the Preservation of the Health of the Jewish Population, in the interwar period. We focus on two campaigns against typhus and favus, the first two disease oriented efforts by OZE, in order to reconstruct the operational approaches, considerations and obstacles faced by OZE as a Jewish organization and transnational participant in the discourse on the health and politics of minorities between two world wars. The analysis of OZE as a transnational Jewish relief organization has a wider significance as an example of international organizations originating from civil initiatives to promote the health of minorities through field work and politics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe paper describes the establishment of the Department of Neurology at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, as well as the department's early activity, emphasizing the role of Dr. Lipman Halpern, one the founders. The paper further illustrates the neurological and psychiatric infrastructure in Palestine of the 1930's, as well as major professional and organizational issues faced by Dr.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo medical delegations, one from Palestine and one from the United States, were sent to detainment camps in Cyprus in the summer of 1947. The British Mandatory government had set up these camps in the summer of 1946 to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants into Palestine after World War II. The purpose of the medical delegations was to screen the camps' inhabitants and to propose a mental-health program for their life in Palestine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article explores the activity of the Bnei-Brak psychiatric asylum and "The Society for the Help of the Insane" in the years 1929-1939 and its role in the development of mental health care in mandatory Palestine. Based on archival materials from the municipal archive of Tel-Aviv-Jaffa and the Israeli State Archive, as well as on the Hebrew daily press, the article concentrates on the administrative, the medical and the political aspects of the Bnei-Brak asylum and on the activities of "The Society for the Help of the Insane" discussing the central problems of the psychiatric field and the mentally ill people in the country during the reviewed period.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper we examine lobotomy operations in mandatory Palestine and Israel between 1946 and 1960. The aim is to reconstruct the circumstances in which these operations were done, and to examine: which patients were lobotomized and why; how lobotomy was perceived by the local psychiatric profession; and the reasons for its decline. Apart from shedding new light on the history of lobotomy, which is usually analysed from the viewpoint of the USA and Europe, this study provides an opportunity to investigate the relation between various concepts of the healthy and ill body in the unique context of Israel, as an immigrant country influenced by its Zionist ideology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of the paper is to explore the development of psychiatry in Palestine from two main perspectives: ethnicity and immigration. In Palestine the subject of immigration and psychiatry were highly complicated and had unique features. Thus, both psychiatrists and patients were immigrants who belonged to the same ethnic group sharing the same ideology and objectives.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF