Focusing on the key turning points in the history of western medicine e.g. the advent of hospitals, the role of public health, the rise of biomedical research, this course offers insights into medicine’s past, asks what has shaped contemporary medicine and how do people study it. By exploring different kinds of medicine – Bedside, Library, Hospital, Community and Laboratory – this course charts the shape and content of the history of medicine from the ancient times to the present day. It looks at the role of doctors, patients, diseases and society’s reaction to them over time and asks how medicine, disease and health have been motors for change. The course encourages its participants to understand how contemporary medicine differs from but is indelibly marked by its past. By directed use of primary and secondary sources it introduces participants to the methods and tools of research in the history of medicine and encourages the critical analysis of differing historical interpretations, including the participant’s own.
Course Objectives
This course will allow you to develop an in-depth exploration of health and healing in Ancient times, to the Middle Ages, up to the Modern period. Sufferers and healers worked with models of the body and therapeutics very different to those of our own day. But healers had to persuade patients of their skills, sufferers had to choose among a range of health-care options, and each sought meaning in experiences of illness in ways that may not be so alien to our experiences. The course focuses upon the organization of health-care, the transmission of medical knowledge, and the experiences of patients, and seeks to relate forms of healing to their social and cultural contexts.
Curriculum PDF will be available soon.