Introductory description

This module examines how the body and mind have been conceptualised across time and place--from changing medical constructs of health and disease, to the moral judgements placed upon ‘abnormal’ bodies and behaviours. Amongst other topics, we will consider the ethics of graverobbing and the international organ trade, the dark history of eugenics and scientific racism, and the roots of current debates over socialised medicine and vaccination.

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.

Term 1
Week 1: The Early Modern Body
Week 2: Early Modern Drug Testing
Week 3: Anatomy
Week 4: Measurement and Classification
Week 5: Psychology and Empire
Reading week
Week 7: Military Medicine
Week 8: The Rise of Science
Week 9: Eugenics
Week 10: Research Workshop

Term 2
Week 1: Diseases
Week 2: Socialist Medicine
Week 3: Medicalisation and Morality
Week 4: Disability and the Challenge to Medicine
Week 5: Post-war Mental Health
Reading week
Week 7: The Global Trade in Health and Disease
Week 8: State Medicine and the NHS
Week 9: Historiography
Week 10: Writing Workshop

Term 3
Week 1: Public Health: An Introduction
Week 2: Public Health: Liberty Vs Compulsion

Learning outcomes

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

• Gain a broad understanding of key concepts relating to the history of medicine, health, and societal conceptions of the mind and body.
• Identify important historiographical debates in the field.
• Identify and engage with a range of relevant primary materials and online resources.
• Gain interpersonal and communication skills through the delivery of a presentation.
• Devise well-defined essay topics, collect relevant data from a variety of sources and present results in an effective fashion.

Indicative reading list

• Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (2004).
• Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (2006)
• Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (2006).
• Rima Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (2006).
• David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993).
• Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830-1930 (1999).
• Alison Bashford, ed., Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present, (2006).
• Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health (2004).
• Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine? A History (2007).
• Jonanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male (1999).
• Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2003).
• Deborah Brunton (ed.), Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800-1939 (2003).
• Sherman Cochran, Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia (2006).
• Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprints and Criminal Identification (2001).
• Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (2000).
• Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison and Steve Sturdy (eds), Medicine and Modern Warfare (1999).
• Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (1996).
• Kaja Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and kinship on the medical frontier (2000).
• Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in American Society. (1993).
• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure Of Man (1996).
• Lindsay Granshaw and Roy Porter (eds), The Hospital in History (1989).
• Joseph Graves, The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium (2001).
• Larissa Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (2008).
• Linda Hogle Recovering the Nation’s Body: Cultural Memory Medicine and the Politics of Redemption (1999).
• Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (1999).
• John Iliffe, The African AIDS epidemic: a history (2006).
• Mark Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds), Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c.1450-c.1850 (2007).
• Gwen Kay, Dying to be Beautiful (2005).
• Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999).
• Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America 1750-1950, (1986).
• Judy Walzer Leavitt, Women and Health in America, 2nd ed (1999).
• Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (2001).
• Hilary Marland (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (1993, 1994).
• Regina Morantz Sanchez, Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn of the Century Brooklyn (1999).
• Dorothy Nelkin, M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (1995).
• Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism (2003).
• Roy Porter, Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (1987, 1990).
• Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (1997).
• Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (1989).
• Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (1988).
• Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine, 1626-2006 (2007).
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes and L. Wacquant, Commodifying Bodies (2003).
• Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in HIstorical Perspective, 2nd ed (1984).
• Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley (2005).
• Gwenda Tavan, The Long Slow Death of White Australia (2005).
• Charles Webster (ed.), Caring for Health: History and Diversity (1985, 2nd edn 2001).
• Paul J. Weindling, Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent (2004).

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.