Decolonizing Public Health Requires an Epistemic Reformation

摘要

Physician-philosopher-revolutionary Frantz Fanon begins his chapter “Medicine and Colonialism” with the ideal setup for Eugene Richardson’s Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health: “Introduced into Algeria at the same time as racialism and humiliation, Western medical science, being part of the oppressive system, has always provoked in the native an ambivalent attitude.”1 Western medical science’s role in subjugation is precisely what Richardson, an anthropologist and infectious disease physician, seeks to unpack as an insufficiently explored driver of the “disproportionate amounts of suffering and death from infectious diseases in the Global South.”