Is there socialist tropical medicine? Why is it important to write state-socialist Eastern Europe in the global history of medicine after 1945? In this episode, Bogdan Iacob tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about socialist tropical medicine, its development, purposes and understanding within Eastern Europe. He explains how state-socialist Eastern Europe shaped the assistance to postcolonial states and WHO programs and what discourses and hierarchies emerged in this context.

Bogdan C. Iacob is a historian working at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History at the Romanian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. His work centres on the role of Eastern European experts in international organisations and post-colonial spaces, and he has contributed to the shifting of paradigm in transnational and global history of medicine, with Eastern Europe in focus.