Advanced Seminar: Medicine On the Frontiers

3 units

When Europeans established maritime empires and trading routes beginning in the sixteenth century, they encountered not only new cultures, but new environments, natural products, and understandings of the human body. The encounters also introduced new ideas and vectors of disease, injury, and death to the societies of Africa, Asia, and the New World. This course examines how ideas about health and healing shaped global interactions in the early modern period and how these ideas were transformed by the movement of information, drugs, and medical practitioners around the world.