Module description
The modules offered in each academic year are subject to change in line with staff availability and student demand: there is no guarantee every module will run. Module descriptions and information may vary between years.
This module examines the history of modern medicine through the ways it has represented, used and transformed human bodies. It takes this focus to consider how historians of medicine have addressed themes of class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and empire, and how medical and scientific ideas, institutions and practices can be understood as integral to wider histories of the modern world. Tracing these changing relationships from the birth of hospital medicine in the early 19th century to the AIDS pandemic at the end of 20th century, the module will provide critical grounding in historical approaches to medicine, modernity and the body.
Examples of themes covered:
Hospital bodies: Surgery and the birth of modern medicine
Laboratory bodies: Experimental medicine, industry and the human machine
Healthy bodies: Dirt, disease, degeneracy and the modern state
Colonial bodies: Imperial hygiene, tropical medicine and the tools of empire
Militarized bodies: War, wounds and masculinity
Expendable bodies: Eugenics, race and human experimentation
Screened bodies: Cancer, gender and the technologies of risk
Pharmaceutical bodies: Drugs, disease and modern identity
Pandemic bodies: AIDS, patient activism and the politics of globalization
Transnational bodies: Organ trading and the global economies of biomedicine
Assessment details
1 x 3,500 words essay (100%)
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, the students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 7 module and in particular will be able to demonstrate that they have acquired: - Key insights into the histories of modern medicine and the body, and an advanced appreciation of their inter - connectedness. - The ability to survey and analyse the various factors that have shaped this history. - Informed and advanced insights into the relevant historiography. - The skills to identify and make a critical assessment of relevant primary literature. - The ability to reflect on these issues in oral and written contexts at an advanced level.
Teaching pattern
10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Suggested reading list
Suggested introductory reading
This is suggested reading and purchase of these texts is not mandatory
- W. Anderson, The Collector of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). An innovative study of the transnational exchange of body parts in making biomedical knowledge and identities.
- D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993). A pioneering study of the relationship between the body, medicine and colonialism.
- J. Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). An excellent gender analysis of the medicalization of soldier’s bodies.
- R. Cooter & J. Pickstone eds., Medicine in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2000). Traces key approaches in the historiography of 20th century medicine, thematically organised around its many ‘bodies’.
- B. Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in 18th Century Germany, (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Chp. 1 ‘Toward a History of the Body’. An outstanding ‘history-from-below’ of the doctor/patient relationship that richly employs gender as a category of analysis.
- S. Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). The best sociological study of how AIDS activists transformed HIV/AIDS drug testing by fashioning themselves as experts and experimental subjects.
- M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception ([org. 1963], London: Routledge, 2003). A classic but challenging account of the formation of modern clinical medicine and its bodies in revolutionary France. Highly recommended.
- A. Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003), A short survey of the long history of the connections between human and animal experimentation.
- R.N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
- A. Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Excellent cultural history of medicine, the body and modernity.
- M. Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). An excellent Foucauldian and feminist analysis of colonial medicine in East Africa.