History of the Body

3.0 credits

From Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, the theory, practices, and social implications of medicine have been bound up with changing ideas about the human body. This course examines how particular communities across time and space have defined healthy and pathological, normal and abnormal, and valuable and expendable bodies. We will survey concepts including the holy body, the mechanical body, the infectious body, the Black body, the monstrous body, and the quantified body, exploring how these concepts have arisen from and contributed to their historical contexts. Our ideas about what bodies are and how they relate to our lived experiences have profound implications for medicine and society. This course will introduce a range of health humanities approaches to the body and help you learn skills like close reading, critical thinking, primary and secondary research, academic collaboration, and historical writing.