Islam, Medicine, and Healing

Catalog description

This course explores the global history of Islamic medicine and healing through the intersections of religion and medicine in multiple contexts. It investigates how questions of health, healing, and illness have been addressed across premodern patterns, colonial and post-colonial transitions, up to the present. Students will examine how different approaches to spirituality, law, and science congeal and compete in relation to the human body, animals, food, pharmaceuticals, medicine, and hospitals. Through considering traditional healing practices to contemporary bioethics, this class analyzes how religion and medicine have been constituted, lived, and experienced around the world.