Posted by C3W Admin on September 25 2025
On 4-5 September 2025, the “Connecting Three Worlds: Socialism, Medicine and Global Health after WWII” project funded by the Wellcome Trust celebrated its successful conclusion with a conference at Keynes Library of Birkbeck college, University of London. The conference brought together scholars from across the globe to celebrate and reflect on ground breaking research that has reshaped our understanding of socialism and socialist world’s role in international and global health history.
Launched in 2021, the project has been on a remarkable journey of discovery, uncovering forgotten networks of medical cooperation that spanned Asia, America, Europe and Africa during the Cold War. Project leaders Dora Vargha, Sarah Marks, and Edna Suárez-Díaz used their opening presentation to showcase the wealth of findings that have emerged from four years of archival research, international partnerships, and scholarly collaboration.
The conference appreciated project members sharing their recent research findings, demonstrating the project’s extensive research scope and impact. Lu Chen presented on the political economy of socialist medicine in China, examining four key dimensions: opposition to healthcare marketisation, universal coverage, resistance to biomedical dominance, and social production of pharmaceuticals. Her analysis revealed the nuanced tensions between socialist healthcare ideals and practical implementation challenges, including resource constraints, bureaucratic hurdles, professional resistance, and competing political priorities. Liang Wan’s presentation examined the World Health Organization’s efforts to integrate traditional medicine into global healthcare frameworks, with particular focus on acupuncture standardisation. His research explored how the WHO’s Traditional Medicine Programme navigated the complex challenge of creating universal standards for practices rooted in diverse cultural and philosophical traditions. Simon Huxtable’s presentation showed how Soviet medical publications constructed and disseminated particular worldviews during the Cold War era. His research examined the Soviet medical press as a site of “worldmaking”, exploring how medical journals, publications, and discourse shaped understandings of health, disease, and medical practice within the broader geopolitical context of the Three Worlds framework.
Sebastian Fonseca’s presentation explored how socialist healthcare initiatives emerged and operated within the complex political landscapes of Latin America, often developing in the margins of dominant capitalist systems. His analysis investigated how these “interstitial” socialist experiments navigated local contexts, external pressures, and varying degrees of state support to create alternative healthcare models across the region. Sarah Howard’s talk investigated Ethiopia’s socialist healthcare policies, tracing the country’s efforts to establish universal coverage and community-centred care within a largely rural context marked by significant resource constraints.
Collaborators of the project also shared their research findings, offering diverse perspectives on socialist medicine across different geographical and temporal contexts. Martin Gorsky from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analysed the failure of US social health insurance politics during the pivotal “1945 moment” from a leftist analytical framework. Mary Brazelton of Cambridge University explored trachoma research connections between the UK, China, and Gambia, examining transnational medical collaboration and knowledge exchange. Bogdan Iacob based at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History/Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies investigated the development and implementation of socialist tropical medicine approaches.
The conference concluded with a themed roundtable discussion led by the project’s Principal Investigators, addressing key questions about socialist medicine’s global impact: What was the influence of the socialist world on Global Health development during the Cold War? How were different versions of socialist public health received, adapted, or resisted across various contexts? What legacies of socialist models persist in current public health practices, and what connections remain? The discussion welcomed participation from the team members, presenters, and a distinguished group of friends and collaborators. These included Andrea Espinoza Carvajal, a former project member who now works at the University of Bristol; Nils Graber and Alila Brossard Antonielli, members from our ERC funded sister project “Socialist Medicine” based at Humboldt University zu Berlin. Additional contributors included Sean Brotherton, Professor and Chair of Anthropology at New York University; Raul Antonio Necochea, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Jessica Reinisch, Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck; Chris Sandal-Wilson from University of Exeter; and Gisela Mateos, Professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
While the formal research phase of the “Connecting Three Worlds” project draws to a close, its intellectual and collaborative legacy is far from over. The project has not only recovered forgotten histories of socialist medicine, but it has also reshaped how we understand the interconnected development of global health systems during the Cold War. The rich archive of materials, methodologies, and international networks established over four years will continue to generate scholarly work and publications. The knowledge uncovered and the collaborative methods pioneered will undoubtedly continue to influence global health scholarship, ensuring that the “Connecting Three Worlds” project’s impact extends far beyond its four-year timeline into the future of international academic collaboration.
Beyond its substantial contribution to recovering the historical legacies of socialist medicine, it has demonstrated the enduring value of its own collaborative research approach. The international partnerships forged between institutions across continents have created a sustainable model for cross-border scholarship that directly mirrors the transnational medical networks the project set out to investigate. The relationships built between scholars from different continents, disciplines, and institutional contexts represent the project’s valuable legacy. The connections forged and knowledge created will continue to facilitate knowledge exchange, joint publications, and future research initiatives, ensuring that the spirit of “Connecting Three Worlds” lives on in the ongoing pursuit of understanding health, medicine, and global solidarity.
