Introductory description

'Matters of Life and Death' is the Term Two core module for the MA in the History of Medicine. The module, taught in the Spring Term, may also be taken by students following any other MA programme in the History Department. 'Matters of Life and Death' will address a range of topics in the history of medicine via selected books authored by teaching and research staff in the Centre for the History of Medicine, enabling close study and reflection on the various historiographical and theoretic approaches adopted in these studies, sources and methodologies. This will enable students to consider how the field is evolving and new challenges in the medical humanities. The students are encouraged to relate these surveys to their own dissertation research and approaches.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Introduction
2. Psychological Subjects
3. Vaccinating Britain
4. Visit to the Wellcome Collection or Science Museum
5. Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany
6. Reading week
7. Contagious Communities OR Alternative Medicine
8. Deaf in the USSR
9. Phrenology, Race and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920
10. Review

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Review the advanced literature in a variety of areas in the history of medicine and the medical humanities.
• Assess the theoretical underpinnings of this work.
• Draw on key concepts from one or more of the social, human and literary sciences.
• Familliarised with the use of relevant primary source material.

Indicative reading list

• Virginia Berridge, Health and Society in Britain since 1939 (1999).
• Tim Brown, ‘Towards an Understanding of Local Protest: Hospital Closure and Community Resistance’, Social & Cultural Geography, 4 (2003), 489-506.
• Wendy Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern Britain: Gender, Diagnosis, and Treatment (2012).
• Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception 1800-1975 (2004).
• Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (2000).
• A.J. Cronin, The Citadel (1937).
• Nick Crossley, Making Sense of Social Movements (2002).
• Angela Davis, Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England c.1945-2000 (2012).
• Anita Guerrini, ‘The Material Turn in the History of Life Science’, History Compass, 13 (2016), 469-80.
• Sarah Gull, ‘Words and Flesh in the NHS’, Medical Humanities, 29 (2008), 67-70.
• Lesley Hall (ed.), Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870-1969 (2005).
• Nick Hayes, ‘Did we really want a National Health Service? Hospitals, Patients and Public Opinions, before 1948’, English Historical Review, 127 (2012), 566-91.
• Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings (2004).
• Mark Jackson (ed.), Oxford Handbook to the History of Medicine (2011).
• Rudolf Klein, The New Politics of the NHS: From Creation to Reinvention (2010).
• Angus McClaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-Tube Babies in Interwar Britain (2012).
• R. Mander and J. Murphy Lawless, The Politics of Maternity (2013).
• Londa Schiebinger, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 23 (1990), 387-405.
• Elise Juzda Smith, ‘Class, Health and the Proposed British Anthropometric Survey of 1904’, Social History of Medicine, 28 (2015), 308-29.
• Nancy Stephan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (1982).
• Michel Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (2011).
• Simon Szeter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1850-1940 (1996).
• George Weisz, Gerald Jorland and Annick Opinel (eds), Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives (2005).
• Kathryn Yeniyurt, ‘When it Hurts to Look: Interpreting the Interior of the Victorian Woman’, Social History of Medicine, 27 (2014), 22-40.

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.