Princeton professor to speak about health care in Brazil

January 27, 2012

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Princeton University professor João Biehl will speak about “The Juridical Hospital: Claiming Right to Health in Brazilian Courts” at 4 p.m. today as part of the the University of Florida’s 2012 Marvin Harris Lecture.

The event, hosted by the department of anthropology in collaboration with the Center for Latin American Studies, will be held in Turlington Hall Room L011. It is free and open to the public.

Biehl will explore the question: What does democratization of the therapeutic imperative and pharmaceutical consumption do to political subjectivities and the idea of social responsibility?

In Brazil, low- and middle-income patients are not waiting for new medical technologies to trickle down. They are using free legal assistance and the levers of a responsive judiciary to gain full access now, according to Biehl’s lecture description.

In his lecture, he will show how right-to-health litigation has become an alternative way for Brazilians to access health care, now understood as access to medicines available through pharmaceutical lists or only available through the market.

Biehl is a Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Woodrow Wilson School Faculty Associate at Princeton University. Additionally he is the co-director of Princeton’s Program in Global Health and Health Policy, and the author of “Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment,” and “Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival.”

The Marvin Harris Lecture Fund is a memorial program, founded in 2002, to celebrate the life and work of Marvin Harris, graduate research professor emeritus of anthropology and Latin American studies at the University of Florida.