BSA Medical Sociology Annual Conference 2019, ‘Medical Paternalism and Public Sphere Intervention: The Role of Health Professionals in the Poisoned Baby Milk Incident’.
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The British Sociological Association (BSA) Medical Sociology Annual Conference 2019 was held on Wednesday 11–Friday 13 September, 2019 at the University of York.
The BSA Medical Sociology Group promotes scholarship and communication in the field of the sociology of health and illness in the UK. The group is one of the largest and most active study groups of the BSA.
Tomoko Tamari presented the paper entitled ‘Medical Paternalism and Public Sphere Intervention: The Role of Health Professionals in the Poisoned Baby Milk Incident’.
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Abstract
The paper examines the significant role of public health nurses, who attend to the existential everyday conditions of patients in order not only to understand and solve their problems, but also to interpret their knowledge and experience so as to make a bridge between patients, medical specialists and the public systems. In the field of medical sociology, there has been little attention paid to the identity formation of public health nurses as medical intermediaries though clinical practice in medicine as well as their activities in the public sphere. By examining the case of the Morinaga arsenic-poisoning baby milk incident in 1955, which caused 12,131 new-born babies to be poisoned with 130 death in Japan, the paper illustrates how nurses developed their self-awareness as public health professionals and autonomous individuals. It also demonstrates the way in which public health nurses overcame the paternalistic patient-doctor relationship in medicine and helped to uncover the dominant forms of political power in social welfare. Drawing on the Bourdieusian concepts of cultural intermediaries and Foucault’s notion of governmentality as a theoretical framework, the paper unpacks the ways in which interactions between public health nurses, victims and medical specialists, helped shape a new form of public sphere, and establish an ongoing welfare system for the survivors.