Professor Simone Kropf

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is a model for all those who work with the history of medicine and health. I would like to stress that one of the most important aspects of WTCHM’s activity has been the establishment of partnerships and relations with researchers in various continents, including Latin America. Those of us who study and teach the history of science repeatedly emphasize the importance of mutual cooperation, dialogue and exchange between countries, as a means of overcoming the traditional “center-periphery” view of research and its results.

The experience of researchers at Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) with the WTCHM has shown us the very positive and real benefits of this dialogue, which is so advantageous in broadening the horizons of the history of medicine in the academic sense and also in its social and political dimension. Last year I had the privilege to take part in the Global Health Histories Seminars (Tropical diseases: lessons from History), organized by WTCHM and WHO in Geneva, where I had the opportunity to discuss the history of tropical medicine in Brazil in a direct dialogue with policymakers who work with the important current issue of neglected tropical diseases. It reassured me how one can and should associate research in the academic field of history and reflection on issues on the contemporary health and medicine agenda.

We all have much to obtain from this dialogue, both in academic understanding and in the political struggle of issues that express the many interfaces between medicine and society, such as the relation between diseases and poverty. For this and many other reasons, the activities of the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine have been decisive and definitely cannot be discontinued. We, Latin American historians, who in the last decades have been struggling, with so much effort, to conquer partnership and exchange spaces such as this one, cannot accept the sudden and unjustified closure of WCHM.

Simone Kropf
Postgraduate Program in History of Sciences and Health
Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil