Society and Health in Historical Perspective

2021/2022

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

4

ECTS credits

Delivered by:

Department of History

Type:

Elective course

When:

4 year, 1, 2 module

Instructors

Vasilyev, Pavel

Loskutova, Marina

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This course surveys the history of medical knowledge and practice from antiquity to the early 20th century. The course will explore a number of ongoing themes: race, bodily difference, and medicine; medicine and the environment; women, gender, and medicine; the history of the body; the history of sexuality; and the close connections between forms of social order and forms of medical knowledge.

Learning Objectives

• Students will understand the fundamental questions and methods of the history of medicine; they will develop critical skills of assessing medicine’s complex role in contemporary society.

Expected Learning Outcomes

• Student will be able to read academic literature for seminars, discuss it during a seminar and participate in a group discussion in English.
• Student will be able to read analytically academic literature for seminars, summarise it, highlight the main arguments, and critically evaluate them
• Students will be able to compare the views of different authors on the same subject, analyse and evaluate the ideas of other students suggested during seminar discussions
• Students will be able to discuss academic literature during a seminar and participate in a group discussion in English

Course Contents

• Introduction
• Health and disease in antiquity
• Health, illness and disease in the middle ages: Europe and the Islamic world.
• European medicine in the 16th-17th centuries
• Medicine and the Enlightenment.
• Health, medicine and modernity (1)
• Health, medicine and modernity (2)
• Epidemics and the Making of Modern Public Health
• Medicine and Twentieth-Century Warfare
• Pharmaceuticalization of Everyday Life
• Global Health
• One health
• Digital health
• Historicizing COVID-19

Assessment Elements

• Participation in seminars
• Short oral or written summary
• Take-home written examination
  A student selects one question from a list and submits a written answer (1-2 pages length, or 1000-1500 words). The essays will be checked and assessed within a week.
• Analytical reading
  Students' comprehension of an assigned reading material is checked through Perusall - for further instruction see www.perusall.com
• A group presentation at the final colloquium

Interim Assessment

• 2021/2022 2nd module
  0.4 * Take-home written examination + 0.15 * Participation in seminars + 0.15 * Analytical reading + 0.15 * A group presentation at the final colloquium + 0.15 * Short oral or written summary

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• Bynum, W. F. (2008). The History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP Oxford. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=363643
• Jackson, M. (2018). A Global History of Medicine. Oxford, United Kingdom: OUP Oxford. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=1668836
• Porter, R. (2001). Bodies Politic : Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900. London: Reaktion Books. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=440604

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• Amelia Bonea, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, & Jennifer Wallis. (2019). Anxious Times : Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Pittsburgh Press.
• Faye Getz. (1998). Medicine in the English Middle Ages. Princeton University Press.
• Laura M. Zucconi. (2019). Ancient Medicine : From Mesopotamia to Rome. Eerdmans.
• Vivian Nutton. (2013). Ancient Medicine: Vol. Second edition. Routledge.
• Wear, A. (2000). Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680. Cambridge University Press.
• История и философия медицины : научные революции XVII - XIX веков, Степин, В. С., 2017