Medicine, Colonialism, Power

Harvard FAS

In this course we will develop an understanding of how modern medicine and global health practices have been shaped by colonial histories whose structures and vestiges remain. Employing interdisciplinary approaches to a variety of global health problems since the nineteenth century, we will analyze how power is expressed in but also contested and reshaped by the medical encounter. Plague quarantines; sex and eugenics; the deployment of psychiatry to stem political resistance; economic…