History of Western Medicine from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Catalog description

This course examines the development of rational medicine and its alternatives from classical Greece and the emergence of the Hippocratic tradition (5th century BCE) through the Black Death (14th century CE). Students will study the social and economic dynamics that support and fuel medico-scientific development; will consider medical competition between educated scholars and unlettered empirics; will evaluate the interactions between scientific medicine and religion, and between medicine and economics.