History and Anthropology of Medicine and Biology
Explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics might include interaction of disease and society; science, colonialism, and international health; impact of new technologies on medicine and the life sciences; neuroscience and psychiatry; race, biology and medicine. Specific emphasis varies from year to year.
Spring 2013
This course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics might include interaction of disease and society; science, colonialism, and international health; impact of new technologies on medicine and the life sciences; neuroscience and psychiatry; race, biology and medicine. Specific emphasis varies from year to year.
Readings
- [D&P] = Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 . Zone Books, 2001. ISBN: 9780942299915.
- [Burnett] = Burnett, D. Graham. Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature . Princeton University Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780691129501.
- [Browne] = Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: A Biography, Volume 1—Voyaging . Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780691026060.
- [Anderson] = Anderson, Warwick. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen . Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780801890406.
- Coleman, William. Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function and Transformation . Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 1–15.
- Foucault, Michel. “Classifying.” In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated from the French ‘Les mots et los choses’. Random House, 1994, pp. 125–65. ISBN: 9780679753353.
- Foucault, Michel. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley. Vintage, 1978, pp. 135–59. ISBN: 9780394417752.
- Rabinow, Paul. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality.” In Incorporations . Edited by Jonathan Crary, and Sanford Kwinter. Zone Books, 1992, pp. 234–52. ISBN: 9780942299298.
- Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “The ‘Epistemic Thing’and Its Technical Conditions: From Bio-chemistry to Molecular Biology.” In The Interaction between Technology and Science . Edited by Bart Gremmen. Wageninggen Agricultural University, 1991, pp. 281–91.
- Kay, Lily. “In the Beginning Was the Word?: The Genetic Code and the Book of Life.” In The Science Studies Reader . Edited by Mario Biagioli. Routledge, 1999, pp. 224–33. ISBN: 9780415918688.
- Haraway, Donna. “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture, Or It’s All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States.” In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature . Edited by William Cronon. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996, pp. 321–66. ISBN: 9780393315110.
- Rapp, Rayna. “How Methodology Bleeds into Everyday Life”, “Accounting for Amniocentesis”, and “The Communication of Risk.” In Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: A Social History of Amniocentesis in America . Routledge, 2000, pp. 1–77. ISBN: 9780415916455.
- Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in ‘Fresh’Organs.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Edited by Aihwa Ong, and Stephen Collier. Wiley Blackwell, 2004, pp. 145–67. ISBN: 9781405123587.
Prerequisites & course information
Same subject as STS.330[J] Prereq: Permission of instructor Acad Year 2027-2028: G (Fall) Acad Year 2028-2029: Not offered 3-0-9 units
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Spring 2013
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.