History of the Medical Sciences

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What did people think about health, disease, exercise, and sports in the past? How did people come to use science to understand health, disease, and human physical excellence? Which scientific approaches have been most helpful, and do we lose anything by taking health and physical excellence more and more as a technical, scientific challenge? This course examines the history of medicine, science, and sports through select episodes from ancient Egypt and Greece up to the present. We will read English translations of documents about health, medicine, science, and sports from people who lived thousands and hundreds of years ago, as well as sources from the science of health and sports today. Along the way, we will survey ancient surgical techniques, tips for the best diets, the rise of academic medicine, discussions of the importance of exercise for human health, the creation of hospitals and major competitions, the Black Death and other epidemics, the development of scientific human anatomy and germ theory, data analytics, and much else. This course assumes no prerequisites and presents the history of science and medicine in terms of stories about people, ideas, places, and objects, rather than in terms of technical problems, problem sets, and labs.