September 29, 2025

S2 Ep8: Randall Packard - global history of dengue fever

43 minutes

After a short hiatus for the summer, we're back with another episode of For the Medical Record! This week, Richard and Mia talk with Randall Packard, professor emeritus in the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University about his new book, Fevered Cities: A History of Dengue Epidemics. We talk about why dengue fever is such an interesting disease to track the history of and how changes to global health are going to impact dengue epidemics going forward.

Related Works:

Randall Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease, a Short History of Malaria (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Randall Packard, A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)

Mari Webel, The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920(Ohio University Press, 2019)

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For the Medical Record is a podcast from Johns Hopkins University's Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, hosted by Research Associate Richard Del Rio and Postdoctoral Fellow Mia Levenson. New episodes are released biweekly.

In these episodes, we talk to people affiliated with the Center to discuss their research within the history of medicine and the medical humanities. We ask them why their work matters, and how history and the humanities can help us to better understand debates and practices within medicine and care today.

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