Chair of History of Science and Political Epistemologies of Bio Sciences and Medicine in the 20th Century

Birgit Nemec has joined the Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical-Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna as Assistant Professor for the History of Science in Medicine and Biosciences. After extended research periods at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, the University of Cambridge, and the Humboldt University Berlin she was a research associate at Heidelberg University and a fellow in the Brigitte-Schlieben-Lange Program before she joined the Charité Berlin as Professor of History of Medicine in 2021. Her research interests include the history of reproduction; sex/gender diversity; patient activism; dis/ability and politics of knowledge; as well as oral history methods and methods of research collaboration. Her book Norm und Reform (Wallstein 2020) explores the role of anatomical body images in struggles over hegemony, bodily norm, and social reform around 1925. At the University of Vienna she will be working on the ERC funded project Beyond Thalidomide. The Patient as an Agent of Change, which examines drug-related disabilities and reproductive health in a global perspective.

ERC Project Beyond Thalidomide: The Patient as an Agent of Change (2024-2029)

Beyond Thalidomide (BT), funded by an ERC Starting Grant brings the patient perspective into the history of drug related risks and reproductive and global health. It traces the global rise of patient engagement with drug-related disability in the second half of the twentieth century to understand how newly empowered agents transformed conceptions of (reproductive) health and disease in science and society. The project maps the conditions of patient engagement with antenatal drug use and reconstructs how patient action created political and scientific urgency starting in 1960. Their multifaceted activities resulted in clashes between different forms of knowledge and expertise that connected actors in the “global South” and “North”—from Latin America through Central Africa, India, and Europe—in the enforcement, implementation, and stabilization of reproductive health approaches that addressed the emerging challenges to democracy and civil society, beyond traditional accounts of expert-led iatrogenic risk management.

The project’s objectives are: 

- To examine transformations in (reproductive) health by interrogating how patients act, organize, activate, and appropriate resources on “markets”, produce knowledge and expertise, and engage and communicate—distinct from authoritative scientific and political-regulatory counterparts (Obj1).
- To develop a Framework of Patients as Agents of Change though the lens of drug-related disability, including the imprint on local, national, and global reproductive health, from the 1960s to the digital age (Obj2).
- To lay the groundwork for a more active and inclusive as opposed to proactive and paternalistic approach to global health policy making, recognizing the challenges of iatrogenic risks and disability and the potential of participatory approaches for democratic governance and civil society (Obj3) 

BT addresses these objectives through the analysis of four interlinked fields of patient engagement:

1. Monitoring and the surveillance of exogenous factors for birth defects
2. Prevention and the management of risks of antenatal drug use in health care systems
3. Global Markets and the development and production of pharmaceutical products
4. Legal action and court intervention

In mapping out these fields of activity, BT will create an ambitious digital collection of patient life stories and a comprehensive integrated framework of how patients engage. BT will deliver, for the first time, a global history of drug-related disability “from below” that examines the shifting contours of patients as agents of change. It takes a groundbreaking approach to the historiography of reproductive health, combining high-impact global case studies with innovative research tools to explore the political, ethical, and social challenges of this alternative perspective and its implications for policy reform.