Medicine’s Culture Brokers: The History of Miami and the Challenge of Diversity in Health Care

Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Milton Meyer Michaels Lecture & Hispanic Heritage Month ~

Catherine Mas, PhD (Assistant Professor of History, Florida International University)

After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees came to Miami. With this influx, the city's health care system was overwhelmed not just by the number of patients but also by the differences in culture. Mainstream medicine was often inaccessible or inadequate to Miami's growing community of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants. Instead, many sought care from alternative, often unlicensed health practitioners. This talk discusses the history of how an exceptionally diverse medical scene would catch the attention of medical social scientists who made Miami's multiethnic population into a laboratory for cross-cultural care and "global health."

Catherine Mas is a historian of science, medicine, and society, whose research and teaching focus on modern American history in transnational context. Her recent book, Culture in the Clinic: Miami and the Making of Modern Medicine, examines the history of health and healing in Miami alongside the rise of medical anthropology. Delving into a period of rapid social and demographic change, she shows how Latinx immigrants transformed American healthcare, as the healthcare system learned to manage a racially and ethnically diverse population.

This lecture will be online only. Attendance is FREE. Zoom link: https://ccac.zoom.us/j/91318349535?pwd=zx3PJ8go1ukPKwyG3bifa65vdYPqpX.1

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.