Topics in the History of Modern Medicine

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will introduce students to important topics in the history of modern medicine in the Western world, tracing the changing experience of health, disease, and the healing professions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While broadly chronological, the course will also be organized topically, particularly for the twentieth century, and will address both the content of evolving medical knowledge as well as its social and political contexts. Possible topics include: hospitals; asylums and mental health; the development of bacteriology; transformations in surgery, such as the introduction of anesthesia and antisepsis; the rise of public health; the intersections of gender, race, and medicine; the growth of the modern drug industry; and case studies of individual diseases, such as syphilis and HIV/AIDS.