5000 Level Courses Offered in the History of Medicine (Intended for Graduate Students and Advanced Undergrads)

HMed 5002  Public Health Issues in Historical Perspective (3 credits)

Introduction to the evolution of major recurring problems and issues in public health including environment and health, food customs and nutrition, control of alcohol and drugs, venereal diseases and public policy, human resources regulation, and the relationship of science to promotion of health.HMed 3001W is Writing Intensive and meets Liberal Education Requirements: Historical Perspective & International Perspective. This course is offered every fall semester.

HMed 5035  The Germ Theory and Modern Medicine (3 credits)

HMed 5035 is an analysis of the formulation of the germ theory of disease and of its consequences for medical procedures (therapeutics, surgery, management of hospitals), public health programs, and the structure and prestige of the medical profession.

HMed 5045  Modern Medical Profession (3 credits)

This course offers a historical analysis of the American medical profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We investigate the role of institutions, the influence of social and moral values, and the consequences of specialization and scientific innovation.

HMed 5055  Women, Health, and History (3 credits)
Professor Gunn

This seminar 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.

HMed 5200  Health and Healing in History I (3 credits; A-F only)
Professor Shackelford

HMed 5200 introduces the student to the history of medicine in Europe from Greco-Egyptian antiquity to the association of post-mortem pathology with disease and the clinical movement of early 19th-century Paris. Beginning with the earliest professionalization of healing, we will follow developments in the perception of health and disease, the elaboration of medical theory, the rise of university medicine and the professionalization of the M.D., social responses to disease and unusual mortalities, and the beginnings of public attempts to deal with the sick and contain epidemics. Students will study not only what medical historians believe actually happened in the past, but also how contemporaries understood health and disease. Interested students may wish to follow up HMed 5200 by taking HMed 5201, but either course may be taken independently.

Students are expected to attend lectures in common with students of HMed 3001W and will be held responsible for material presented there, but will meet separately for discussion with the instructor once a week in a discussion/seminar atmosphere, where assigned readings will be discussed. One or more discussion leaders will be appointed for each week’s meeting. Each student is also required to write a research paper on a topic to be chosen in consultation with the instructor and also complete a mid-term and final examination.

This course is offered every fall semester.

HMed 5201  History of Medicine from 1700 to 1900 (3 credits)
Professor Eyler

This course is the second semester of the introductory survey of the social and intellectual history of medicine intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. The course requirements differ for graduates and undergraduates. Listed below are the requirements for undergraduate students. It is recommended that undergraduate students have some prior training in history, history of science, or history of medicine. (Class time: 100% discussion; work load: 150 pages of reading each week, 20 pages of writing per semester, 1 exam, 5 papers) Please contact the department for further information.

This course is offered every spring semester.

HMed 5210  Seminar: Theories and Methods in Medical History (3 credits; A-F only)

Historiography of the history of medicine

This course is offered every fall semester.

HMed 5211  Seminar: Theories and Methods in Medical History (3 credits; A-F only)
Professor Gunn

Use of archives, primary sources, supervised research project

This course is offered every spring semester.

HMed 5940  Topics in the History of Medicine (3 credits)

Topics vary.

Fall 2003: Mundane and Divine in Medieval Medicine, 1200-1600, Professor Shackelford

The body is a natural topic in today's society. As a nation and as individuals we are often preoccupied with our physical self, our appearance, our health, our pleasures, and our material possessions. But for the medieval Christian, the body was necessarily viewed in a spiritual as well as a corporate context - it made no sense whatsoever to think of the health of the body apart from the health of the soul, or the life of the individual body apart from the life of the communal body. From conception to exaltation, the medieval Christian's body was tightly bound to the mundane and the divine, and any discussion of medieval medicine must needs consider the linkages between the part and the whole and the body and soul in popular practices and learned formulations.

We will explore the following topics:

• The ensouled body - conceptions and consequences of the living human body: health and disease, psychology, spiritual health of the body, insanity, sexual identities and pathologies, astrological medicine



• The body after the soul - human death and dissection; public display and punishment of the body


• The body before the soul - issues of reproduction and its control, astrological determinism, Renaissance eugenics


• Other related topics

This topics course is intended for upper-level undergraduates and graduates, for students of the Middle Ages, for early modernists, for historians of medicine - for anybody with a pressing need to explore this topic in a seminar format. There will be a term paper and several "reaction papers" (assessments of assigned readings), but no exams. Active participation in weekly meetings of the seminar is required. Cross-listed with Medieval Studies 5610. Contact: shack001@umn.edu for more information.