Diagnosis: History, Culture, and Ethics

1.5 Unit

Diagnosis is an act with tremendous power, with implications for personal identity, social life, medical care, and insurance coverage. But diagnoses are not stable entities: they shift through time and space, and their nature and boundaries are often highly contested or controversial. This class will rely on academic work from history, sociology, philosophy, bioethics, and medicine, in addition to personal stories and news reporting, to explore the complexity of diagnosis. We will ask and answer questions like, what is a diagnosis? Who decides what "counts" as a medical condition? How do diagnoses change over time? How do they gain or lose stigma? We will not attempt to solve diagnostic mysteries, but rather to explore what they reveal about the practice of medicine and its relationship to our social world. Offered as BETH 399 and BETH 499 .