The history of medicine shows how societies have faced health crises in the past and how they have changed their approach to illness and disease over time. This class is a survey of the history of medicine in the U.S., focusing on changing concepts of disease, medical practices, institutions, patient experiences, and public health measures. In particular, the course examines how shifting ideas about gender, class, and race shaped experiences of illness and suffering, as well as medical knowledge and education. While the course focuses on the history of American medicine, it acknowledges that changes in the practice, theory, and education of medicine often do not occur in isolation but are part of global developments.

The 2020 outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) was the most significant public health emergency of the 21st century so far. For many, the experience of contagion, stringent public health measures, and quarantine, the idea of healthy carriers, and the racialization of a virus were a novel experience. The history of medicine shows how societies have faced health crises in the past and how they have changed in their approach to illness and disease over time. This course is designed as a survey course in the history of medicine in the United States. We will address themes such as epidemics of the past, the medical marketplace and the emergence of a medical profession, the rise of germ theory and the new public health, vaccination, medical experimentation and racialized medicine, medical views of women and their bodies, popular understandings and experience of health and illness, health activism, as well as biomedicine and the intensification of medical technology. This course focuses on the relationship among medicine, science, and society, and the ways in which culture frames medical definitions and interpretation of bodies, health, and disease. In examining these issues, the course will pay particular attention to how people are affected differently by medical practices and technologies depending on their race, gender, and class.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills