Medicine, Science, and Technology in Latin American History

Catalog description

This graduate course explores the history of medicine, science, and technology in early modern Latin America and Iberia, integrating interdisciplinary approaches and local/global contexts. It is designed to give students an overview of some of the key historiographical debates and research in these fields for Latin America and Iberia, and to provide a basic familiarity with the forms that this field of historical/interdisciplinary inquiry has taken in recent years. Some of the themes that we will explore are the role of empire building in shaping medical, scientific, and technological knowledge; how "non-Western" (indigenous, African, Asian, and mixed race) healers, artisans, and scientists innovated, developed, and recreated their practices and societal roles under colonial rule; the historical development of public health in Latin America; and the interactions between global processes of Western knowledge production and local-level multi-ethnic Latin American knowledge production. This course will be of interest to those studying colonial Latin America, those who wish to understand the colonial legacies of issues important to modern Latin America research topics, those interested in the early modern era in a comparative and/or global perspective, and those who wish to prepare for the Latin America or Early Modern World fields of their comprehensive exams.