HIST 400 – Medicine and Disease before Biomedicine

Course description

What led to medicine as we understand it today? What were the social consequences of the Black Death? Was Western medicine really all-Western? These are some of the questions that we will ask during this survey of the history of medicine before 1800. The course focuses on four themes from Antiquity through the Scientific Revolution.

• The transformation of medical theory, from the birth of Galenic medicine, a medical system that lasted almost two thousand years, to Renaissance anatomy and beyond.
• Changes in medical practice. Models of the body and therapeutics were different from what they are today, but healers had to persuade patients that they could actually alleviate their problems, and sufferers had a variety of healing choices.
• The birth and development of medical institutions and regulation, the ways in which medicine came to be regulated and practiced from the Medieval hospital to new medical regulation in Colonial and Early Republic America.
• Global transfers of knowledge and disease, from the translation movement of the High Middle Ages, to the so-called Columbian exchange, till the links between medicine and colonial empires. We will explore bodies, cures, diseases and their social consequences in their social, cultural, economic, scientific, technological, and ethical contexts.

Objectives

The aim of the course is to offer an overview of the different ways in which people understood disease, health, the body, and medical knowledge from Antiquity to 1800.
Upon successfully completing this course, students will be able to:
– develop a solid conceptual understanding of the course material
– describe the fundamental medical actors, concepts, and practices of Western medicine
– analyze medieval and early modern medical practices in historical context
– explain the causes and consequences of the Black Death
– describe changes that made early modern medicine different from that of the Middle Ages
– approach primary sources with a historical perspective
– demonstrate good communication skills: written, oral, visual and interactive, to understand and tell the history of the past.

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