A total of twelve modules are offered for this course, across four subject areas. All students should attend at least two core modules, which run for four weeks during Michaelmas Term. Eight optional modules run during Michaelmas and Lent Term, and students should attend at least two optional modules. 

Michaelmas Term:

Core Modules

Medical Anthropology: Key Themes

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.

Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Core

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.)

Medical Sociology Core

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.

History of Medicine Core

The course offers an introduction to medical history by exploring some of the most interesting writing on the kinds of medicine practised in domestic sick rooms, on hospital wards and in laboratories. The major theme is the ways in which changing social relations have shaped knowledge and management of disease and the experience of illness.

Optional Modules

Medical Anthropology Elective Module 1: 'Non-Normal' – Bodies, (Dis)Abilities, Epistemologies

Sensation, we are told, is “the most confused notion there is… for having accepted it, classical analyses have missed the phenomenon of perception” (Merleau-Ponty 2012:25). Despite this, ‘sense’ as it is typically described in academic Euro-American texts is often unquestioned. Anthropological engagement in sense and the body, as Scheper-Hughes & Lock famously argued, can be seen as invisibly but normatively contrived, symptomatic of the culture in which they are analysed rather than in the body-subject itself. The emphasis of this seminar is to contend with social and physiological interventions in the body – particularly ‘disabled’ bodies which are adjusted (or not) to be more ‘normal’. We will examine alternative perceptions of body, sensing, being-in-the-world, and privilege to re-define what ‘normal’ is and what it does in/for anthropological praxis.

History of Medicine Elective Module 1: Reproductive Technologies

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?

Medical Sociology Elective Module 1: Sociology of Reproduction

This module explores key themes and questions surrounding reproduction and new reproductive technologies from a sociological perspective. It focuses on the ways that different formations of power, institutions, norms, and structures of social differentiation affect reproductive possibilities, choices and pathways. How does the gendered regulation of reproduction relate to colonialism, legacies of slavery, and capitalist political economy? How are new reproductive technologies shaped by, challenge, and reaffirm gender, sexuality, race and nation? What can movements for reproductive justice teach us about the unequal regulation of reproduction? Through investigating a range of case studies, the module also reflects on different methodological approaches to studying reproduction sociologically.  

Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Elective Module 1: AI in Healthcare

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in biomedical research and clinical practice. This course introduces students to the unique philosophical and ethical challenges involved in the use of AI in medicine. Topics include the interpretability and explainability of artificial systems, the ethics of robot carers, the role of AI in medical diagnosis, and the implications of using AI in biomedical research. Please be prepared to discuss the core readings before each session.

Lent Term:

Optional Modules

Medical Anthropology Elective Module 2: Aging in the Contemporary World

How do people experience the process of growing old in our contemporary world, an unsettling time—marked by climate change, war, pandemics, and the rise of right-wing discourses? Are there enough resources to offer care to most of the population? How is age, pain, and death reconfigured in the last years of life? With longevity becoming a global trend in our contemporary societies, these questions take new relevance. This module begins by exploring what it means to and how can one grow old well, or well enough, despite these unsettling times. We then turn our attention to care and its complexities in our neoliberal era, attending to questions of who can access it and what people expect care to be like. The last two sessions examine pain, which is central to medical care yet reliant on subjective experience and resistant to language and, secondly, what are the cultural perspectives on death, which eventually comes for everyone. 

Medical Sociology Elective Module 2: The Political Economy of Biomedical Innovation

This module enables students to understand social science perspectives on the contemporary bioeconomy. It will explore how the biomedical research enterprise is being reshaped by governments and corporations as they search for competitive advantage in an increasingly global bioeconomy. The module is interdisciplinary drawing inter alia on science and technology studies, socio-legal studies and political economy. Topics covered will include: the emergence of the idea of a knowledge-based economy, and its function as part of the neoliberal state project (the shift from government to governance); the concept of promissory science and the promotion of biotechnology as a ‘frontier technology’; intersection between public policy and commercial strategy, and the changing relationships between governments, corporations and academic scientists; the role of regulation as a both a response to and a shaper of biotechnologies; the importance of intellectual property rights in the bioeconomy, the legalisation of patents on novel life-based technologies and the globalisation of the IP regime favoured by Western pharmaceutical companies through the TRIPS agreement.

Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Elective Module 2: Non-Epistemic Values in Biomedical Research

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.

History of Medicine Elective Module 2: More-than-Human Health

Nonhuman animals are often by our side when it comes to human health and wellbeing. As disease vectors, proxies for humans in laboratories, sources of pharmaceuticals or parts of therapies themselves, animals have shaped modern medicine in numerous important ways. This module draws on historical literature, as well as some theoretical perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, to interrogate the changing human-animal relationships in the twentieth century and their role in shaping both human and animal health. The course will investigate the uses of animals in medical practice, the controversial topic of animal experimentation, the rise of 'One Health' approaches to medicine across species, and the connected histories of livestock farming, environment, and health.