About

Central and East European History of Medicine Network

This is a blog run by Sarah Marks (University of Cambridge), Mat Savelli (McMaster University) and Dora Vargha (University of Exeter) for historians of medicine working on Central and Eastern Europe to share work and connect.

Dora Vargha is lecturer in medical humanities at the University of Exeter. Previously she was postdoctoral research associate at Birkbeck, University of London, participating in a Wellcome project titled “The Reluctant Internationalists:  A History of Public Health and International Organisations, Movements and Experts in Twentieth Century Europe” and was a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (MPIWG). Dora completed her PhD at Rutgers University in Modern European and Women and Gender History and is working on a book tentatively titled Iron Curtain, Iron Lungs: Governing Polio in Cold War Hungary. She is especially interested in the intersections of history of medicine and gender, childhood and disability and in using the locality of Eastern Europe to approach global public health issues. Contact: d.vargha@exeter.ac.uk

Sarah Marks is a Junior Research Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge. She studied History, Science and Technology Studies, and East European Studies at University College London, where she continues to collaborate with the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines. Her thesis examines the construction of psychiatric knowledge in Czechoslovakia and East Germany in the transnational context of the Cold War. She is currently working on an edited volume with Mat Savelli entitled Psychiatry in Communist Europe (Palgrave, 2015), along with a book on the History of Psychotherapy.

Mat Savelli is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Health, Ageing and Society at McMaster University.  He completed his doctoral dissertation on the history of psychiatry in Communist Yugoslavia at the University of Oxford’s Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, then held postdoctoral positions at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Phildelphia and the University of Pittsburgh.  His current research analyzes the global history of psychopharmaceutical marketing.  In addition to an edited volume (alongside Sarah Marks), he is currently working on a book about the social psychiatry movement in Yugoslavia.