Introductory description

This module is designed to introduce students to both major developments in medical thought and practice AND the main methodological approaches and debates used within the field of the history of medicine. It covers the early modern period to the twenty-first century, and invites the students to think comparatively about medicine across space and time and includes sessions on Britain, Europe and global medicine and health. The module focuses on the evolution of ideas, language and technologies within medicine, the reception of these new approaches and lay responses to them, the structure of medical practice, and the scientific, social, and cultural context of medical intervention.

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. Introductory Session
2. Mental Health
3. Global Health: Malaria and Small Pox Eradication
4. Cultures and Practices of Childbirth and Reproduction
5. Public Health in the Soviet Union
6. Reading week
7. Public Health/Private Practice
8. Early Modern Bodies
9. Early Modern Drugs Testing
10. Professionalisation and Regulation

Learning outcomes

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

• Demonstrate a conceptual and practical understanding of the skills of an historian of medicine
• Demonstrate the ability to formulate and achieve a piece of critical and reflective historiographical writing
• Demonstrate the ability to undertake critical analysis
• Demonstrate the ability to formulate and test concepts and hypotheses
• Demonstrate the ability to work with a range of sources and to employ them to debate challenging questions and issues

Indicative reading list

• Mark Adams (ed.), The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (1990).
• David Armstrong, The Political Anatomy of the Body: Medical Knowledge in Britain in the Twentieth Century (1993).
• David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993).
• Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2012).
• Roger Cooter and John Pickstone (eds), Medicine in the Twentieth Century (2000).
• Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany (1991).
• Mary Fissell, Patients and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (1991).
• Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (1973).
• D.M. Fox and C. Lawrence, Photographing Medicine (1988).
• Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter (eds.), Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Post-war Britain and the Netherlands (1998).
• Chris Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (1998).
• 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).
• Joan Lane, The Making of the English Patient (2000).
• Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (1995).
• Hilary Marland, Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield, 1780-1870 (1987).
• Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (1998).
• Dorothy Porter, Health, Civilization and State (London, 1999).
• Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners (1985).
• Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and the Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (2001).
• D.J. Rothman et al. (eds), Medicine and Western Civilisation (1995).
• Andrew Wear (ed.), Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (1992).
• Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660-1770 (1995).

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.