Do No Harm? The Pursuit of Justice in the History of Medicine

Catalog description

This course examines the history of how people have understood and experienced health and sickness, and how people have practiced medicine and had medicine practiced upon them, from ancient times to the present. It places particular emphasis on the historical relationship between expert and lay medical knowledge, and in understanding how cultural values have informed the diverse ways that different societies have practiced medicine. The course similarly explores how medical knowledge and practice have become a potent form of cultural authority open to both great accomplishments and great abuse. In particular, we will examine how women, persons of African ancestry, persons with disability, and other historically marginalized groups interact with medical knowledge and practice. Using the analytical tools of social constructivist theory, the course examines how medical knowledge and the practice of medicine can be agents used to maintain structural inequalities. Crucially, however, marginalized persons and their allies also have used their own medical knowledge and practice to challenge those inequalities.