AIGT or AIG? Reflections on memory and forgetting

Editorial

In this perspective, Starlin Vijay Mythri, psychiatrist, palliative care physician ánd supervisor for residents Medical Doctor Global Health (MDGHs), reflects on the significance of changing names. Last year, the Dutch training programme Arts Internationale Gezondheidszorg en Tropengeneeskunde was officially renamed Arts Internationale Gezondheidszorg (MDGH in English).

Mythri makes a case for retaining the term tropical medicine – not simply as a reference to the field’s history, but as an opportunity to challenge established power relations and help shape more equitable global health partnerships and healthcare that is context-sensitive, ethically grounded and just.

Main content

I’ve heard that the T was removed recently because it is colonial. Was it removed to be forgotten? What are we achieving with this? After a few days, will future doctors recognise the letter’s absence and/or remember its past presence?

Even our body leaves a scar, a memory of an injury, a story of pain and healing. Why does Europe want to forget its colonial past? Do we do justice to the past and its people by forgetting? Are we doing it for ourselves in the present so that we can sleep without guilt?

‘Tropical’ in Greek and Latin only had topo/geographical meaning, which was later given a colonial sense of being humid, hot, and dirty. [1,2]

As a psychiatrist, I remember Karl Meninger’s words in Whatever became of sin? [3] He says that medicalisation of sin as individual, familial, or social pathology erases the importance of guilt, conscience, and responsibility. I hope that we’re not making this same mistake by forgetting the T. When did we grow past the need for the memory of the past? What will we become after we’ve forgotten the past? A distorted Nietzschean amoral beast like the Homelander from The Boys, perhaps!

For colonialists, ‘Tropical’ might refer to an inferior humid place full of inferior people. We have had similarly thinking ancestors in our own history. The Latin for the word ‘human’ is said to have come from ‘humus’ or humid, i.e. from the soil? We are all from this same earth. No one is superior or inferior – no race, no religious identity, no gender, or caste. In this post-liberal age, our far-right political ideologies are pushing us to withdraw inwards [4], become isolated as nations, and forget our common past (the good along with the bad) by erasing the memory, the names, and the letters, like T in the present case.

I admire AIG/T for inspiring young doctors to work in conflict zones, in the broken lands, in humanitarian missions, in the old colonies, and thereby reconnecting with the tropics. This time not to take, but to give. Will it turn inwards, too, just like the prevailing political winds, by erasing the T? Will doctors now take knowledge and skills from foreign lands and become cultural experts for their own land?

Now, after erasing ‘Tropical Medicine’, we’re left with the word ‘Global Health’ (GH). I have a few problems with this. For starters, what’s GH? I’ve asked many people, but I couldn’t get a proper answer. Even Koplan’s definition [5], where GH stands for ‘improving health and achieving equity in health for all people worldwide’, doesn’t talk of imperialism, capitalism and old & new colonialism. As opposed to terms like community medicine, public health, and family medicine, used in the rest of the world, this new Euro-American contraption claiming to encompass the whole world (‘Global’) is devoid of context and history and wants the AIG/T residents to be everything for everyone. To me, this sounds very similar to the universalist, messiah-complexed colonialists’ self-image.

Semantically, at least the T had a context, history and reference point, in contrast to the vague, homogenising, difference-erasing GH. Philosophically, the problem at work in favouring GH while erasing the T, is the fear and/or disregard of ‘difference’ and concrete particularity, on the one hand, and aspirations of feeling satisfied/accomplished as the saviours of the whole world, on the other. If doctors and health workers forget the past and disregard the context, i.e. the lived and socio-historical conditions of health, then what’s the point of healthcare?

If my European friends think they can cure the disease of human excess and moral problems by simply erasing a letter, then it’s time they realised that they are just making cosmetic changes and not tackling the real underlying problems.

Through the eyes of my Christian faith, I know that,

Sin is the reminder that we need a Redeemer.

When Christ touches our hearts, we become, as Augustine of Hippo wisely puts it, simul justus et peccator – remembering our sin, yet living like Christ.

The term ‘tropical medicine’ needs to exist as an artifact of the past and become a driver for an equitable relationship between the erstwhile colonizers and the colonized, i.e. for an ethical healthcare which is contextual and just.

Let’s do something different from what our colonial ancestors did.

References

Anderson W. Colonial pathologies: American tropical medicine, race, and hygiene in the Philippines. Accessed September 24, 2026. https://www.dukeupress.edu/colonial-pathologies
Bhattacharya N. Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India. Liverpool University Press; 2012. doi:10.5949/UPO9781846317835
Menninger Karl A. Whatever Became of Sin? New York, Hawthorn Books; 1973. Accessed September 24, 2026. http://archive.org/details/whateverbecameof00menn
Pirro ALP. Far right: The significance of an umbrella concept. Nations and Nationalism. 2023;29(1):101-112. doi:10.1111/nana.12860
Koplan JP, Bond TC, Merson MH, et al. Towards a common definition of global health. The Lancet. 2009;373(9679):1993-1995. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)60332-9