Overview

9.00am Public plenary: History of Medicine in the Pacific Panel Chair: Susan Lederer Panelists: Kerri Inglis, W. Matt Cavert, Safua Akeli Amaama

The three members of this panel will draw on their areas of expertise to discuss major issues involving the history of medicine and health in the Pacific region. Kerri Inglis, from the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo, specializes in research in the history of health, disease, and medicine, especially as it pertains to Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, within a global context. She has devoted her career to studying the history of leprosy in Hawaiʻi and has conducted extensive research on patients’ experience at Kalaupapa Peninsula on Molokai prior to 1900. Safua Akeli Amaama, the former Head of History and Pacific Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa who has recently taken up a new role in Germany at the Üebersee-Museum in Bremen, has a particular interest in Pacific-New Zealand relations and has also studied the development of public health care in Samoa during the twentieth century, including the colonial organization of leprosy care during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. William Cavert, from the University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu, is an expert on the French colonial Pacific. He has published scholarly articles on the history of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Tahiti and an outbreak of bubonic plague in New Caledonia around 1900. Cavert has also analyzed different responses to the 1918 influenza pandemic in other Pacific islands, including American Samoa, and has examined lessons learned from the 1918 pandemic for responses in different territories, including Hawaiʻi, to the recent COVID pandemic.

Lead presenting author(s)