Medicine, Colonialism, Power
SOC-STD 98MP
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
In this course we will develop an understanding of how modern medicine and global health practices have been shaped by colonial histories whose structures and vestiges remain. Employing interdisciplinary approaches to a variety of global health problems since the nineteenth century, we will analyze how power is expressed in but also contested and reshaped by the medical encounter. Plague quarantines; sex and eugenics; the deployment of psychiatry to stem political resistance; economic interests behind COVID-19 responses – these and other flashpoints can help us understand how modern conceptions of race, gender, the individual, the body, illness and health were constructed. This is less a “history of medicine” than it is an exploration of what medicine and health can reveal about how power relations operate in our everyday lives. Assignments in this course culminate in an independent research paper, emphasizing historical and archival methods. This is a junior tutorial.
Course Notes
This course will be lotteried and is open to non-concentrators if space permits. This course must be taken for a Letter Grade and cannot be taken Pass/Fail.
Not Available for Cross Registration
