Cambridge Lecture in the History of Medicine

Dora Vargha (Exeter) gave the Cambridge Lecture in the History of Medicine on Thursday 22 January 2026 at 3.30–5.00pm in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre. Prof. Vargha also led an informal workshop at 11.30am on the day before.

Lecture

Communist M*A*S*H: Life, Death and Politics at a Hungarian field hospital in North Korea

With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, bringing together most of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mongolia and China, a loosely coordinated medical aid to North Korea laid foundations for a new cooperation for countries that found themselves outside of the new, liberal international order. Medical missions physically connected newly established socialist worlds as doctors, nurses and technicians travelled 15.000 km over land, air and sea, through Moscow and Beijing; established close professional and personal relationships with other eastern Europeans on site, with Korean, Chinese and Russian colleagues; and engaged in a common, revolutionary world-making through shared experiences of shortages and ideas of fraternity. Based on extensive research on the Hungarian mission to North Korea between 1950-57, through the everyday life of the field hospital this paper considers complex relationships between war and health, the challenges hospitals face in war zones, and the mobilisation of ideologies and geopolitics in the justification of conflict – and networks of solidarity.

Workshop

We will discuss a pre-circulated draft for the introduction to Volume 6 on 'Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Medicine' of the Cambridge History of Medicine, which Prof. Vargha has been working on with Guillaume Lachenal.

About the lecturer

Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities, based jointly at the University of Exeter and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is co-editor of the Cambridge History of Medicine (6 volumes) and the Johns Hopkins University Press book series 'Epidemic Histories'. Her work focuses on questions of global health and biomedical research in the Cold War era, using the locality of Eastern Europe as a starting point. Her research has won multiple prizes, including the EAHMH Book Prize, the AAHM J. Worth Estes Prize and the Wellcome/AHRC Prize for Best International Research in Medical Humanities. She is currently leading two research groups: Connecting Three Worlds (Wellcome Collaborative Award), which explores socialist networks in global health history, and Socialist Medicine (ERC Starting Grant), which aims to explore an alternative global health history. In a new interdisciplinary collaborative project, After the End (Wellcome Discovery Award), her research focuses on stakes of unstable endings, and straightforward scripts of disease narratives in biomedical research, medical practice and global health policies.