Disease, Ideas, and the Law

Catalog description

During the past (almost) two years, the novel COVID-19 virus has travelled through the social body and inflamed many of its fractures. The crisis has prompted important medical and scientific questions, but it has also raised key issues related to society, religion, and the law. These include problems of inequality, the relationship between individuals and the state, ideas about bodies, and the role of ritual and belief questions that have also emerged in previous crises. This course examines how people in colonial Latin America (16th and 17th centuries) and in the modern United States (20th and 21st centuries) made sense of these questions when their own social bodies were afflicted with disease and epidemics.