Body Parts, Body Wholes: An Introduction to the Comparative History of Medicine

Undergraduate

This course examines the possibilities and problems of comparing medicine across time and region. We will begin by considering divergent conceptions of the body in Chinese and Greek antiquity before moving on to the transformation of the healing traditions and the advance of modern biomedicine since 1800. Instead of imposing "holism" or "reductionism" on medical traditions, this course encourages students to view past expressions of medicine as a means of analyzing our own self here and now.