Research Seminar in the History of Medicine

Catalog description

This course is focused on comparing and contrasting ethnographic and historical approaches to health and medicine. We will engage ethnographic and historical approaches to health and medicine to explore the methodological, empirical, and theoretical stakes of thinking medicine, disease, and the body across and within disciplines. Taking a methodological and comparative approach, the course will explore ethnographic and historical approaches to such themes as the body, disease, pharmaceuticals, and biomedical knowledge-production in global and historical context. We aim to develop skills and knowledge for critically reading anthropological, historical, and sociological literatures on medicine, the body, and disease. As such, students will develop a research project, which may be in either the history or anthropology of medicine and/or science, or a project, which combines such approaches, utilizing the comparative and methodological frameworks of the course to develop an original analysis on a topic of their choosing.