STS.330
History and Anthropology of Medicine and Biology
See description under subject 21A.319[J] .
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 21A.319[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.