The Care of Foreigners: Immigrant Physicians and the U.S. Health Care System

Date: 

Tuesday, March 12, 2019, 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Location: 

Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Eram Alam, Assistant Professor of History of Science, Harvard University

In 1965, the United States invited thousands of physicians from other countries to fill vacancies that could not be filled with American doctors. While this strategy was meant to be a short-term solution, it became a permanent feature of the U.S. health care system. Today, one quarter of practicing doctors in the U.S. are International Medical Graduates. Eram Alam will discuss the sociopolitical circumstances that encouraged physician migration to the U.S., the enduring consequences of this migration to communities across the country, and the challenges that immigrant doctors face in the U.S.

About the speaker:

Eram Alam specializes in the history of medicine, with a particular emphasis on globalization, migration, and health during the twentieth century. She is currently working on two book projects. The first, The Care of Foreigners: A History of South Asian Physicians in the United States, 1965-2017, explores the enduring consequences of postcolonial physician migration from South Asia to the United States. The second book, a co-edited volume with Dorothy Roberts, is called Ordering the Human: Global Science and Racial Reason. This project brings together a disciplinarily diverse group of researchers from around the world. Collectively, they investigate the malleability and situatedness of race, the work of consolidating racial ways of knowing, and the forces and flows that dictate the movement of racial concepts in scientific knowledge production.

Free and open to the public!