Module Details (26-27)

This course offers an introduction to the history of medicine. It considers key concepts, ranging from bedside medicine and the medical marketplace to the construction of disease and the gendered body. Through classic and innovative readings in the field, it reflects critically on what medicine means and it addresses the challenges of studying a ‘scientific’ discipline with a ‘global’ history that spans thousands of years.

What is “illness”? Who defines “health”? How do social processes affect each, in individuals and in collectives? How did a lack of health become associated with deviation? What are the values that underpin medical practice today? Building on insights from medical anthropology, this course critically explores diverse ideas of health and illness alongside a range of health-related practices. After considering how ‘Western’ biomedicine constructs its objects, we will explore the various ways in which people make sense of their health conditions. We will examine lived experiences of illness, and the ways in which illness is constructed and understood by those who are affected by it, as well as those who are treating it, and how truths about bodies are produced across historical periods and medical systems. The second part of the course will begin by examining how differential health outcomes relate to social inequalities, drawing on the idea of structural violence, and how these are further exacerbated by ongoing environmental disruption. An exploration of environmental health in relation to the New Pandemics will lead us to a reconsideration of biopolitics as a form of governance of populations. 

This module is designed to thoroughly acquaint students with the profoundly social nature of human health, illness, and disease. On a more pragmatic level, it is meant to facilitate a solid grasp of the most fundamental debates in the field, and to inspire, encourage, and prepare students to contribute to these debates. To this end, we will consider several facets of the relationship between human society and human health and illness. Major themes will include concepts of health and illness, the doctor-patient relationship and alternative medicine, health inequalities, and the relationship between social marginality and mental pathology. 

This core module will introduce students to philosophical perspectives on health, medicine and society. Half of the module will cover core topics in philosophy of medicine, and the other half will cover topics in medical ethics. (Note that the optional modules discuss some of these issues in more detail). 

This module will introduce students to histories and historiographies of public health, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern processes of industrialization, urbanization, and migration have shaped the health of peoples and environments around the world. After an orientation to the history of public health, we will examine these trends in the contexts of colonial medicine, intersections between public health and state power, and global health. Key themes include risk, responsibility, expertise, and authority.  

Who can expect to live to old age? How long can people hope to live in relatively good health? How are health and personhood reconfigured in the later years? As increases in longevity around the world affect how older age is experienced and understood, questions such as these take on new relevance. This module will begin by exploring explore ideas of the life course, life stages, and inequalities associated with aging. We will then turn to the lived experience of aging, focusing on personhood and the body. The concept of care, in the third session, allow us to bring population perspectives into conjunction with the more immediate experiences of carers and those for whom they care. In the final session, we will discuss cultural perspectives on death and the ends of life. 

Each week the students are required to read the essential texts marked with an asterisk and at least one of the further texts. The ‘selected themes’ draw together thematically organized text for those looking for optional readings.  

In preparation for each week’s seminar, the students are requested to submit a reading response online, based on the essential readings. The reading responses are not summaries, they are required to critically engage with the text. 

Over the past three decades or so, a sociology of global health has emerged. While drawing upon several subfields of sociology, including organizational sociology, science and technology studies, and global and transnational sociology, the sociology of global health also connects with foundational elements of medical sociology as well the history of science and medicine. This 4-week elective course will provide students an opportunity for an advanced introduction into the area of the sociology of global health exploring key themes including, the sociology of pandemics, the sociology of international health organizations, social movements, health inequalities, and comparative systems of health care provision.   

There are very many ways in which ethical, social, political and cultural values shape biomedical research. In these sessions, we analyse two key topics arising from the "value-ladenness" of bio-medical research: first, whether and when it undermines claims to objectivity and knowledge; second, how it does and should affect the communication, reception and uses of biomedical research, both by individuals and private and public corporate actors. In addressing the first set of topics, we address some key debates in recent philosophy of science over the viability of the "Value Free Ideal". In addressing the second, we investigate the philosophical bases for various proposals for reforming research structure. 

Reproductive technologies are constantly in the news. This module goes behind the headlines to take a longer and broader view. Historically grounded but drawing on research in several disciplines, it will reconstruct how our modern world of reproductive practice and controversy was made. In the process we shall explore such questions as: Why has so much reproductive technology been directed at women and what have been the roles of men? What power over technology have designers and users been able to assert? How and to what extent have reproductive technologies become everywhere the same? What have been the relations between controlling the reproduction of humans and of other animals? 

What does it mean to inhabit a toxic world? In this module, we will examine toxicity as a ubiquitous, yet inequitably distributed, condition of contemporary life. We will begin by tracing anthropological approaches to poisoning and toxicity and how these have evolved. We will then turn to ethnographically grounded examinations of the material, epistemological, socio-political, and lived dimensions of toxicity. Taken together, the module investigates how toxicity is produced, known, governed, and experienced, and what anthropological attention to its uneven distributions can reveal about bodies, health, and life conditions in the contemporary world.

This module presents sociological and political-economic perspectives on a broad range of health technologies, with a particular focus on pharmaceuticals but also covering diagnostics, monitoring or imaging technologies, and other health technologies both in clinical settings and for everyday use. The module explores how health technologies shape the experiences of both patients and professionals in the healthcare system, and more broadly how they influence discourses, practices and policies in relation to health in society. It will consider how the use of health technologies can involve a tacit adoption of certain epistemologies or other assumptions, and a range of social concerns around health technologies, including those over their safety, efficacy, accessibility, and affordability. We will critically discuss how health technologies have reshaped society and what has happened when they have gone wrong, without losing sight of their potential to improve and lengthen many lives. 

This optional philosophy and ethics of medicine module will consider questions at the intersection of philosophy, technology and mental health. The ways in which we seek mental health support, and conceptualise mental health challenges, are undergoing a huge technological shift. Many are accessing information, peer support and even psychotherapy online, mediated for example by social media, online patient communities and AI chatbots. What are the consequences of this shift? Do the benefits of wider access outweigh the risks of interventions being administered outside of the traditional clinical context? Topics covered include the use of chatbots for psychotherapy; how AI use complicates serious mental illness (like delusion or psychosis); self-diagnosis and the production of new knowledge by online epistemic communities; and whether our interactions with technology are changing, not just the state of psychiatric knowledge, but psychiatric kinds themselves.