3000 Level Courses Offered in the History of Medicine (Intended for Undergraduates)

HMed 3001W: Health Care in History I (3 credits)
Professor Shackelford

Health Care in History I is the first semester of a two-semester introduction to the social and intellectual history of European and American medicine. It is designed to form part of a general liberal arts education and it presupposes no special technical knowledge of medicine or the biological sciences. HMed 3001W and 3002W form a chronological sequence, but they may be taken independently.

History of Medicine 3001W is a writing intensive survey of the history of Western biomedical ideas, research, and health care practices from the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foundations to the clinical movement of the early nineteenth century. These ideas and practices have left their marks on modern medicine and help explain the origins and appeal of today’s alternative medicines as well. Many of our modern attitudes about the proper relationship between patient and practitioner, for example, are founded on the ideas set down by Hippocrates and Galen in ancient Greece and Rome. Today’s herbal medicine is also in large measure shaped by the experiences and discoveries of early European and Middle Eastern healers. Similarly, one can find the origins of modern pseudo-scientific and quack medicines in early modern theories about how to regulate the kinds of and amounts of stimulation that people receive from their environments, which were believed to affect the healthy flow of fluids and spirits throughout the body.

Early Greco-Roman medicine was fundamentally different from modern practices owing to differences of cultural values, institutions, and organization of society. In the first few weeks of the course, assumptions about normal and abnormal functions of the body, and contrasting theories of reproduction and differences between the sexes that are significantly different from today’s are considered. This knowledge holds the key to understanding the evolution of modern ideas in human biology, pathology, and therapy and helps explain previous generations’ attitudes toward gender distinctions. How classical and medieval Islamic medical ideas were assimilated by Germanic northern Europe, to form the basis of the Western university medical tradition, is considered in weeks 5-6. European responses to the first recognized, large-scale threats to public health – leprosy, plague, and syphilis – are taken up in weeks 7-9. These diseases were often regarded as infective, brought by foreigners, and as having a moral dimension, not unlike AIDS today, and they elicited similar medical and social reactions. The public health measures that were constructed to deal with epidemic diseases grew out of Renaissance Italian urban governmental responses and were gradually tested and supplemented by various north and central European nations, resulting ultimately in cooperative, enforced quarantine and sanitation measures and regulations that have become standard practice. During the Reformation, new medical movements arose in Germany and Italy and rapidly spread throughout Europe, engendering differing responses, as nations attempted to assimilate them. During weeks 10-13 we consider in particular how humanist and Paracelsian ideas and practices within medicine were received in various venues, depending on religious, social, and philosophical biases, as is evident in the trial of a Dutch physician in London that students read. The consensus that resulted from the adoption of early modern scientific principles in medicine contrasts with widespread theoretical innovations, as experimental investigation captured European medical research (weeks 14-15).

HMed 3001W is Writing Intensive and meets Liberal Education Requirements: Historical Perspective & International Perspective. This course is offered every fall semester.

HMed 3002W: Health Care in History II (3 credits)
Professor Eyler

This course is the second semester of a two-semester introduction to the social and intellectual history of modern European and American medicine. It is designed to form a part of a general liberal arts education, and it presupposes no special technical knowledge of the biomedical sciences. The two semesters form a chronological sequence (HMed 3001W, 3002W), but the second semester course can be taken without prior enrollment in the first. The focus of HMed 3002W is on American developments since the mid-nineteenth century, although the influence of European experience on American health and health care will be emphasized. We will investigate the practice of physicians, surgeons, and some of the alternative health care providers. We will also study the growth and professionalization of health care and its increasing use of science and technology. The evolution of the hospital, the training of physicians, the responses to infectious diseases, and the changing relationship between doctors and patients will all be featured.

HMed 3002W is Writing Intensive and meets Liberal Education Requirements: Historical Perspective & International Perspective. This course is offered every spring semester.

HMED 3040 Human Health, Disease, and the Environment in History (3 credits) Professor Eyler

This course is an introduction to the changing relationship of human health and disease and the environment in which humans exist. We will explore the complex ecological determinants of human health, and employ historical analysis to demonstrate how human-induced environmental changes have altered our experiences with disease and our prospects of health. In the process we will follow some of the major themes which historians interested in human health and its relationship to the environment have pursued. We will explore the changing patterns of human disease from the Neolithic Period to the present and discuss the types of evidence used to reconstruct and explain those changing patterns. Such evidence is drawn from a variety of scientific and scholarly fields. We will not only discuss what this diverse evidence can suggest about the history of human disease and environmental change but also the very significant problems of interpreting such evidence. This course is intended to form part of a general liberal arts education and assumes no special technical knowledge of the biomedical sciences.

Syllabus

HMed 3055: Women, Health and History (3 credits)
Professor Gunn

The course combines a lecture and seminar format. It investigates women's historical roles as healers, patients, research subjects, and health activists. Using secondary literature, diaries, biographies, and archival materials, students will have latitude within the seminar format to explore individual interests. Topics to be covered include: views of gender and the body; reproduction and childbirth; mental health; nursing; women physicians; public health reformers; the Black Women's Health Movement; alternative practitioners; disparities in diagnosis, treatment, research, and health careers; and the Women's Health Initiative. The course is intended for mid to upper-level undergraduates. It does not require any previous work in history or history of medicine.

HMed 3055 meets Liberal Education Requirements: Historical Perspective & Cultural Diversity.

Syllabus

HMed 3065: Body, Soul, and Spirit in Medieval and Renaissance European Medicine (3 credits)
Professor Shackelford

Body/soul in medieval theology/cosmology. Religious conceptions of body/soul. Medical conceptions in medieval world. Medieval/renaissance psychology. Medical astrology and its consequences. Medical normal/abnormal body. Medicine of reproduction and sexual identity. Death, burial, dissection, and resurrection in medical/religious perspective.  Macrocosmic/microcosmic body. Limits to human power/authority over body.  Anatomical/chemical body/spirit.

This course meets the CLE Historical Perspective requirement.