Course Description
"Health above all", right? But what are actually “health”, “hygiene” and “disease”? What is the medical treatment that takes us from a state of illness to health? Illness, recovery and health are universal experiences but they are also not uniform. Medicine is a science that is particularly influenced by social, cultural and political realities. The challenges of Covid-19, including face masks, vaccines and closures, illustrate for us the variety of perceptions and practices that shape our choices in everything related to our health, but this was also in the past. The course explains how men and women, healers and patients, from East Asia to the British Isles in pre- modern times up until the 18th century, understood medical knowledge, the human body, illness, health, death.

Course outcomes
During the course students will learn about the range of medical knowledge and the variety of health practices in previous historical circumstances. They will be able to understand how medical knowledge and the health system in the present is the complex outcome of both successes, innovations, and inventions, but also mistakes and failures. Students will also gain familiarity with the historical toolkit through weekly reading in diverse, textual and visual primary sources in the historical lab .

Assessment
Active contributors to class discussions (30% of the final grade); a 5-minute presentation of a primary source (10% of the final grade), and take-home exam at the end of the semester (60% of the final grade).

Class discussions will be based on reading materials and primary sources. These include, for instance:
Aberth, John. Plagues in World History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.
Cavallo, Sandra and Tessa Storey. Healthy living in late Renaissance Italy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Green, Monica H. "'History of Medicine' or 'History of Health'?" Past and Future, 9 (2011), 7-9.
Green, Monica H. "Climate and Disease in Medieval Eurasia," in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.
Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Porter, Roy. Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors and Lunatics.
Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2006.
Snowden, Frank M. Epidemics and Society; From the Black Death to the Present. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019.
Soon, Wayne. Global medicine in China: A diasporic History. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Varlik, Nukhet. Ed. Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean. Kalamazoo; Bradford: ARC Humanities Press, 2017.

Last updated: January 29, 2025