Bivins Roberta
Like their peers across western Europe, Australia and the Americas, large segments of the British public and a significant proportion of Britain’s medical establishment have enthusiastically promoted medical screening (and de facto medical selection) of would-be migrants since World War II. Moreover, from 1962, British law explicitly empowered medical inspection and the exclusion of migrants on health grounds at all three of Britain’s idiosyncratic ‘medical borders’: during entry clearance procedures in their countries of origin; at Britain’s ports and airports; and via public health surveillance in the British towns and cities that were the migrants’ destinations. However, Britain’s geographical and internal borders were largely unmedicalised in the twentieth century and remain comparatively free from specifically medical controls even today. I explore the role of the National Health Service – both as a national symbol and as a physical institution – in shaping and responding to this paradox. Given the intensity of popular suspicions of migrants’ bodies and their hygienic and reproductive practices, and the frequency with which medical claims mediated and bolstered anti-migrant rhetoric, why has medical ‘control’ itself proven politically elusive and persistently suspect?
自第二次世界大战以来，与西欧、澳大利亚和美洲的同行一样，英国公众的很大一部分以及英国医学界的相当一部分人热情地推动了对潜在移民的医疗筛查（以及事实上的医疗选择）。此外，自1962年起，英国法律明确授权在英国三个独特的“医疗边境”进行医疗检查并基于健康理由排除移民：在其原籍国的入境签证办理程序中；在英国的港口和机场；以及通过对移民目的地的英国城镇进行公共卫生监测。然而，英国的地理和内部边境在20世纪基本上没有实行医疗化，即使在今天，相对而言仍没有特别的医疗管控。我探讨了国民医疗服务体系——既是一个国家象征，也是一个实体机构——在形成和应对这一矛盾中所起的作用。鉴于民众对移民身体及其卫生和生殖行为的怀疑程度之深，以及医疗主张调解和支持反移民言论的频率之高，为何医疗“管控”本身在政治上被证明难以捉摸且一直受到怀疑？
