Eram Alam
historian of race, medicine, and migration
Harvard University
Department of History of Science
Eram Alam is an associate professor of the history of medicine in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research investigates the entanglements of medicine and migration in the twentieth century, demonstrating how U.S. healthcare has relied on migrant practitioners and transnational networks of care to sustain its most basic functions.
In her first book, The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, Alam explores this dynamic from the perspective of immigrant physicians who were recruited to the United States to provide care in healthcare shortage areas throughout the country. This book will be out with Johns Hopkins University Press on October 14, 2025.
Alongside this project, Alam co-edited a collection of essays called Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science (Columbia University Press, 2024). This volume brings together scholars from across the globe and explores how race as a political technology is deployed to construct and maintain hierarchies of difference.
Alam's next project, Patients Without Borders, investigates US patient movement to sites outside of the country for routine medical care. Dental care in Mexico, orthopedic surgery in Lithuania, cardiovascular treatments in India, cancer care in Thailand: these destinations welcome a steady flow of patients armed with US dollars and unable to access these procedures quickly and cost-effectively in the United States.
Latest Publication
The Care of Foreigners
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The Care of Foreigners examines this migratory dynamic that began during the Cold War.
The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial Asian nations and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with immigrant physicians comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor force since the act became law. This book foregrounds the global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians—and especially practitioners from South Asia—have become integral to US medical practice and ubiquitous in the US public imagination.
Drawing on a range of sources, The Care of Foreigners analyzes both the care provided by immigrant physicians as well as the care extended to them as foreigners in the United States.
Harvard University
History of Science Dept.
1 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
