Jesse Olszynko-Gryn: Palestine and the politics of medical publishing

In this lecture, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn presents a new historical research project he has been developing on the politics of medical publishing and censorship in contemporary Britain.

The project uses oral history and archival research to ask how politically contentious issues qualify for inclusion or exclusion from legitimate medical discourse in liberal democracies, who gets to decide, and on what grounds. It takes Palestine as a limit case to examine how medical writers, editors, and publishers have had to negotiate tensions within and beyond a divided professional community. In so doing, it recovers a crucial yet little studied power struggle over the accepted parameters of medical publishing.

Olszynko-Gryn contends that the history of this power struggle throws into sharp relief previously neglected features of a more general and still unresolved debate over the politics of medicine that has pitted the concept of medical neutrality against the idea, most strongly associated with public health, that medicine is always already political.

Historians of science and medicine have had a lot to say about journals, publishing, and communication more generally. Drawing on this literature, this lecture thematises the act of publication or censorship as a crunch point that reveals the ideological alignments of liberalism and its effects on the production of medical knowledge and ignorance about Palestine.

Omar Tesdell, professor at the University of Birzeit (Palestine) will participate (online) as a discussant.

Jesse Olszynko-Gryn is Head of the Laboratory for Multimodal History in the Department Knowledge Systems and Collective Life at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and author of the book A woman’s right to know: Pregnancy testing in twentieth-century Britain (MIT Press, 2023).