Module description
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%)
Teaching pattern
10 x 2-hour weekly seminars