MED HIST 746 — RACE, SCIENCE, AND MEDICINE: PAST AND PRESENT
2 credits.
Examine ideas about race and ethnicity and their relationship to the history of “Western” medicine and science. Analyze the role of social, economic, cultural, and political developments in the shaping of scientific and medical notions of race and bodily difference. Study how skin color (and other elements of “racial identity”) has influenced the experiences of patients and populations, physicians and nurses, and medical researchers. Discuss how conceptions of race have shaped both the health concerns and health outcomes of Americans in the past three hundred years, and the structure of medical institutions in the United States. Topics include the origins of racial classification, race and colonialism, the health and medical care of the enslaved, the use of enslaved people as research subjects, the history of racial disparities in medicine, structural racism of the medical establishment, race and reproduction, and the struggle for justice in health care during the past few decades.
MED HIST 750 — OUTBREAK!: EPIDEMICS, MIGRATION, AND THE CHANGING CONTOURS OF GLOBAL HEALTH
2 credits.
Explore national and international health projects aimed to address infectious disease epidemics in the context of changing ideas about human difference, the shifting economic and socio-political dimensions of international health, and the history of migration. Using a range of sources from historical documents, social science, films, and biomedical research, explore circumstances linking ideas about “alien” people (a term historically used to talk about enslaved people, Native Americans, minorities, and immigrants), and “plagues.” Examine the relationship between ideas about disease and migration, risk factors and disease patterns related to migration, migrant populations’ access to health-care resources, perceived threats of infectious diseases related to migrant populations and the ways such threats have shaped medical theories, and the institutional landscape of global health.
MED HIST 753 — INTERNATIONAL HEALTH AND GLOBAL SOCIETY
1 credit.
Advanced readings that examine major problems in modern international health. Focus on epidemiology and disease ecology; political economy of health; migration; quarantine; international health research; cross-cultural healing; mental and maternal health; growth of international health organizations.