Home » Departments and Centres » Academic catalogue » Course detail

Open sidebar menu

History of Medicine (HEC-RS-HISMED-24)

HEC-RS-HISMED-24

Description

This research seminar asks, ‘What is the history of medicine?’ It seeks answers within the framework of The Cambridge History of Medicine, 6 Volumes, for which Lauren Kassell is the General Editor.
Once dominated by progressive narratives written by retired practitioners focused on national contexts, over the past fifty years the history of medicine has become a recognized field within the historical discipline on an international stage. It has been written as intellectual, social, and cultural history, and relates to historical demography and the histories of representation and material culture, gender history, and the history of science. More recently, it is associated with disability history and environmental history and sometimes folded together with medical humanities. In the process, the history of medicine has been extended to include broad definitions of health and healing, spanning the spectrum of living beings from microbes to humans, and extending to life and death. Yet despite its capaciousness and its formalization within university departments and learned societies, and codification within, respectively, the courses they teach and the journals and books they publish, the history of medicine remains eclectic as a professional category, instantiated differently depending on national and institutional context and topic of specialization.
Prompted by the simple interrogatives who? what? why? and where?, the first four sessions of the seminar consider foundational arguments within the history of medicine under the headings Patients and Practitioners; Beings, Bodies and Minds; Health and Disease; Places, Institutions and Networks. The remaining six sessions are organised chronologically, following the structure of the volumes. Each pair of volume editors—Rebecca Flemming and Laurence Totelin, Zubin Mistry and Ahmed Ragab, Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, Suman Seth and Yi-Li Wu, Rana Hogarth and Projit Mukharji, Guillaume Lachenal and Dora Vargha—will lead a discussion about what makes the history of medicine distinctive in their period of study.
More generally, the seminar has four aims. (1) To introduce the history of medicine. (2) To reflect critically on what medicine means, as an ideal and as a reality. (3) To address the challenges of studying a ‘scientific’ discipline and writing a ‘global’ history that begins in 3000 BCE and runs to the present day. (4) To model approaches, building on multiple historiographical traditions, to a plural and decentred vision of history that complicates Eurocentric narratives of progress.

 

Register for this course