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The Environment in Modern Medicine
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Health and Environmental Change
In this course, Dr Olwenn Martin (University College London) explores the relationship between environmental change and human health. In the first lecture, we outline the role of environmental factors in medical understanding through history, noting their sidelining with the rise of modern anatomical explanations for health and disease, and its recent re-emergence. The second lecture then looks at the relationship between economic development and better health, and how this association is being undermined by human-caused environmental change. In the third lecture, we consider the ways in which the environment, particularly in the context of climate change, can be related to disease. We conclude with a fourth lecture examining some approaches to addressing environmental change and its impacts on human health.
The Environment in Modern Medicine
In this lecture, we think about how the place of the environment in the study of medicine has changed through history. We focus on: (i) the shift away from environmental factors as central to understanding disease from ancient to modern medicine; (ii) the greater focus on anatomy over environment in modern medicine, and how this was facilitated by developments from the 17th century like the invention of the microscope; (iii) the sidelining of environmental health from this period, in which it became a specialist sub-discipline within medicine, rather than central to it; (iv) the revival of interest in the relationship between health and environment since the Second World War, particularly in the context of concerns around planetary boundaries.
Hello. My name is Oluwen Martin.
00:00:05I'm an associate professor in the department of arts and
00:00:08science at UCL,
00:00:11and I lead the health and environment pathway on the
00:00:12interdisciplinary bachelor of arts and science.
00:00:15So today, I'm going to talk to you about environmental change and disease.
00:00:19So when I started being interested in topic and
00:00:26teaching this topic,
00:00:28one of the things I wanted to understand was a little bit the
00:00:29history of medicine and its
00:00:32relationship with the environment.
00:00:35And I struggled for for a while until I found the work of
00:00:38Christopher Sellers.
00:00:42Turns out that this interdisciplinary scholarship
00:00:43is, emerging.
00:00:46It's it's only quite, recent interest,
00:00:48in this, and I found this article to place or not to place.
00:00:51Going through this,
00:00:56history and sort of explaining how we went from, Hippocrates,
00:00:57where environment explains all of health when we
00:01:01about air, waters, and places,
00:01:05to where we are now.
00:01:07And I'm going to reuse the story with which she opens this
00:01:08article, which is that of Alvarez Salgado.
00:01:12She's a young mother in, Smeltertown,
00:01:15in El Paso, Texas, and she has a a toddler
00:01:19daughter that has just started to walk.
00:01:24When she suddenly start she develops some difficulties.
00:01:28She's, she keeps falling. She goes limp, etcetera.
00:01:31So Elvira takes her daughter to the newly built, local,
00:01:35hospital where doctor eventually,
00:01:39diagnosed,
00:01:43young daughter with a rare genetic syndrome called b
00:01:45guillain barre syndrome.
00:01:48And this is quite illustrative of,
00:01:50how we've become disconnected because what the doctors
00:01:53completely ignored was that, as the name of the town,
00:01:57smelter town indicates, Elvira lives,
00:02:01in the vicinity of of a huge, lead smelter.
00:02:04And the symptoms exhibited by our daughter are quite typical,
00:02:08of, lead poisoning.
00:02:13And then sellers goes on to sort of, explain how, you know, through
00:02:17history, we go from looking out at the
00:02:24place to looking, in.
00:02:29So there's a series of,
00:02:32development that sort of shape western medicine,
00:02:34such as dissection in ancient times is quite taboo.
00:02:38It's not done. We know very little of, anatomy.
00:02:42When that taboo is lifted, we start learning more.
00:02:46That anatomical knowledge can be, disseminated,
00:02:49using the printing press.
00:02:54There are other things such as the French revolution and its
00:02:56ideals of health care for all that and its blueprint for
00:02:59hospitals that came with morgues,
00:03:03and morgues come with an, you know, almost endless supply of,
00:03:05dead bodies of of poor people.
00:03:10There is the microscope,
00:03:13so where we can look in more and more inside the body at
00:03:14sort of tissues, organs, and then cells.
00:03:18And we, in order to sort of forget,
00:03:21the place in the environment.
00:03:24The topics is not entirely, forgotten.
00:03:25It's sort of set aside.
00:03:28It becomes specialist subjects, environmental health,
00:03:30public health, or tropical medicine,
00:03:34and now we've got to acknowledge the role that
00:03:36tropical medicine played as a tool,
00:03:39in sort of implementing
00:03:42colonialism.
00:03:46They become side subjects, specialist subjects,
00:03:48and not part of mainstream medicine.
00:03:51So first forward to, after the second World War,
00:03:54there,
00:03:59we have a large reconstruction effort.
00:04:01So what we're seeing is, you know, increased production,
00:04:05increased consumption, and increase in population.
00:04:09We have the creation of,
00:04:13multilateral agencies such as the United Nations.
00:04:15There is the, threat of nuclear war because of the cold war,
00:04:20which is a global threat.
00:04:24There is also the space race,
00:04:25and sort of seeing us from space.
00:04:28And with all of these events come sort of realization
00:04:31that we live on a finite,
00:04:35fragile, planet.
00:04:39We see the publication of some seminal works and critical
00:04:41events at that time as well.
00:04:45So in nineteen sixty two,
00:04:46we've got Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,
00:04:48who is looking at the,
00:04:51effect of pesticides on eggshells sinning and the
00:04:52populations of, birds.
00:04:55We have this group of experts from different disciplines,
00:04:59including economists,
00:05:03in a club of Rome that sort of publish and create a model sort
00:05:04of looking at the limits to growth in nineteen seventy two
00:05:08because, you know, economic growth is based on natural
00:05:12resources and natural resources are finite.
00:05:16So the first United Nations, conference in Stockholm, on,
00:05:19on the environment in Stockholm in nineteen seventy two,
00:05:25as well.
00:05:29So with this, we see this sort of, accompanying this, we see
00:05:30the emergence of
00:05:36new interdisciplinary disciplines or their reemergence.
00:05:39Again, that's about, western thought, the idea of,
00:05:44our dependency on the environment and,
00:05:49you know, ecosystems and nature being very important for health is
00:05:54is, a set often a central tenet in a lot of indigenous, medicines.
00:05:58So we see these
00:06:04new disciplines emerging, some of them looking at sort of,
00:06:06politics, other looking at social and mental justice.
00:06:09More recently,
00:06:13two that are talked about more are one house and and planetary house.
00:06:15So I'm a member of the planetary health alliance,
00:06:19so I'll acknowledge that my work and what we're going to
00:06:21see today is sort of informed by the work I've done looking
00:06:24at the planetary health education framework.
00:06:27
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Martin, O. (2024, November 18). Health and Environmental Change - The Environment in Modern Medicine [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/health-and-environmental-change
MLA style
Martin, O. "Health and Environmental Change – The Environment in Modern Medicine." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 18 Nov 2024, https://massolit.io/courses/health-and-environmental-change