Health, Medicine, and American Culture

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will introduce students to representations of health and medicine in American fiction and non-fiction. We will discuss the history of medicine spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Civil War hospitals; critiques of segregation in health care; emerging questions of medical ethics; and the entanglements of gender, sexuality, and science. Throughout, we will ask how writers of fiction such as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Harper, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Charles Chesnutt, and Edith Wharton have responded to crucial moments in the history of medicine. We will also consider how medical and literary texts from the past speak to contemporary debates about health care in the twenty-first century. This course will involve class discussion and essay writing.