Critical Case Studies
Over the past decade, historians of medicine have renewed their attention to how systems of social hierarchy shape health, clinical authority, and medical knowledge. This conversation has become prominent in both scholarly and public spaces, driven by research that documents how structures of exclusion and inherited social categories influence access to care, the experience of illness, and the development of medical institutions. Much like broader debates on inequality, these medical-historical discussions have grown in part because of community-based activism, archival recovery projects, and collaborative work between scholars and affected communities. Recent efforts to document forms of structural discrimination within hospitals, public health programs, colonial medical services, and global health initiatives have highlighted the need for a more expansive historical analysis of how social ordering shapes medical practice.
Within this emerging landscape, historians and historical anthropologists have called for sustained attention to caste-like and caste-derived forms of hierarchy as they operate in medical settings. Scholars working in South Asia, the global diaspora, and comparative imperial medical history argue that such hierarchies should be approached as embedded social and political crises that have long influenced the organization of healing professions, the distribution of Labor within hospitals, the visibility of certain bodies in medical research, and the uneven burdens of disease. This approach invites a broader field of “critical hierarchy studies” within the history of medicine, one that interrogates how medical authority is built, maintained, resisted, and transformed across time.
Although histories of race, class, and gender have long shaped the field, the specific role of caste and caste-linked structures remains underexamined. Work in South Asian medical history has illuminated how colonial public health, missionary medicine, sanitation campaigns, and early biomedical training were deeply entangled with caste dynamics. Yet these insights have not fully migrated into comparative histories of medicine, despite their direct relevance to questions of power, vulnerability, and the governance of populations. Returning to this gap, this special issue reframes caste and caste-related hierarchies as essential topics for historians of medicine who study how health systems take shape under conditions of colonialism, migration, economic inequality, and modern state formation.
This issue also builds on foundational debates about the relationship between race and caste, a topic engaged by figures such as B. R. Ambedkar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and others grappled with how different systems of stratification structure lived experience, political possibility, and access to life-sustaining resources. Revisiting these debates in a medical-historical context is especially important today, given the resurgence of caste politics in North America and South Asia, alongside heightened attention to racialized health disparities, anti-Muslim violence, and global security regimes. Medical history stands to gain from examining how these systems intersect in the governance of health, the policing of bodies, and the shaping of clinical and scientific authority.
Building from these concerns, this special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine asks:
a. How might the concept of caste, and caste-linked hierarchies, expand historical analyses of inequality within medicine, public health, and scientific knowledge?
b. How do histories of caste inform, complicate, or challenge prevailing models of racial formation and biopolitical governance?
c. In what ways do colonialism, global white supremacy, and systems of modern statecraft shape the medical grammars through which caste has been reproduced, contested, or transformed?
By placing caste and caste-derived structures into conversation with medical history, this issue introduces readers to new debates about inequality, expertise, and embodiment. It examines how caste has intersected with other categories central to BHM’s scope: race, religion, gender, sexuality, and class, and how these intersections have shaped clinical authority, patient experience, and institutional power. The issue also highlights historical and contemporary cases where anti-caste activism emerged in medical, scientific, and public-health contexts, including struggles over hospital Labor, access to medical education, community health movements, and campaigns for legal and institutional reform.
Contributors examine these questions through a wide range of methods and archives, drawing on ethnography, social history, institutional archives, oral histories, visual and material culture, scientific texts, and histories of colonial and postcolonial governance. Articles engage topics across anthropology of medicine, history of public health, global health history, critical ethnic studies, religious studies, sociology, communication, and cultural history. Collectively, they illustrate how caste and caste-linked structures have shaped medical knowledge, structured health inequalities, and influenced the ethical and political frameworks through which societies determine who receives care.
Suggested submission topics include:
- Historical relationships between caste and race within medical and public-health systems
- Caste-based and caste-analogous systems in non-Hindu and diasporic medical contexts
- Representations of caste and medical authority in literature, visual culture, and scientific writing
- The circulation of caste in political, clinical, and public-health discourse
- Histories of Dalit, Bahujan, and other oppressed communities’ medical activism, religious practice, or social organization in response to caste
- Caste abolition, colonial medicine, settler colonialism, and the politics of health
- Caste, security regimes, the war on terror, and the governance of racialized medical subjects
- Digital health cultures and the role of online activism in shaping caste-related medical debates
- Social movements seeking legal protections against caste discrimination in medical or scientific institutions
Movements challenging caste-based exclusion within medical education and public-health infrastructures