Paper short abstract:

Health scientists and historians encounter the debris, reversals and opportunities that form in the wake of changes in plausibility. This paper explores the survival of three abandoned dreams of (inter)national public health amid a reopening of futures in the time of global health in Senegal.

Paper long abstract:

In 1966, Pierre Cantrelle announced a near future of accurate and comprehensive vital registration in rural Africa. In 1974, a proposal for a national medicinal plant research institution written by Joseph Kerharo was approved by the Directorate of Scientific and Technical Research. In 1973, Georges Gras suggested the creation of a national poison control centre to the Senegalese authorities. 

Decades after they never happened, these plans remain present as (im)possible futures on old paper, in jokes, regret, hope and celebration, or in new and ongoing visions of global health intervention and research. As these futures, as plans, vanish for those who awaited them, and for historians leafing through records, what becomes of this archive of the plausible? Is it a reminder of past and future possibility, or does it break up into forgotten fragments and residue of the utopic? And what should one make of recent echoes and revivals of past developmental plans in the time of global health?