200A. Introduction to History of Health Sciences

Fall 2005

Tuesdays, 10-12

LH 485 seminar room 

WEEK ONE : Ancient Concepts of Health and Dis-ease in the “Western Medical Tradition”
WEEK TWO : Medieval Medicine
WEEK THREE : Early Modern Medicine I: The Revolution of Celestial Bodies
WEEK FOUR : Early Modern Medicine II: The Revolution of Terrestrial Bodies
WEEK FIVE : The Enlightenment: A New World of Learning
WEEK SIX : The Emergence of the Medical Marketplace and Patient Experience
WEEK SEVEN : Industrialization and Environmentalism
WEEK EIGHT: Health in America
WEEK NINE : Normal and the Pathological in the Birth of the Clinic
WEEK TEN : Nineteenth-Century Reform and Resistance

WEEK ONE : Ancient Concepts of Health and Dis-ease in the “Western Medical Tradition”

* Pre-Socratic Philosophy
* Hippocratic Corpus
* Platonic Theory
* Galen

Primary Readings :

Plato, Timaeus typescript in COURSE PACK

Hippocrates, Air, Waters and Places typescript in COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

James Longrigg, “Philosophy and Medicine: Some Early Interactions”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology , Vol. 67. (1963), pp. 147-175.

Jerome J. Bylebyl, “The Medical Meaning of Physica”, Osiris , 2nd Series, Vol. 6, Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition. (1990), pp. 16-41.

G.E.R. Lloyd, “The Hippocratic Question”, The Classical Quarterly , New Series, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Dec., 1975), pp. 171-192.

G. E. R. Lloyd, “Plato as a Natural Scientist”, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 88. (1968), pp. 78-92.

Vivian Nutton, “The Patient's Choice: A New Treatise by Galen”, The Classical Quarterly , New Series, Vol. 40, No. 1. (1990), pp. 236-257.

WEEK TWO : Medieval Medicine

* Medieval Hospitals
* Medieval Cures
* Arabic Medicine

Primary Readings :

Selected readings from the Source Book of Medical History (Logan Clendening, ed., New York: Dover, 1942), COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

Vivian Nutton, “From Galen to Alexander: Aspects of Medicine and Medical Practice in Late Antiquity”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 38, Symposium on Byzantine Medicine. (1984), pp. 1-14.

Katharine Park, “Medicine and Society in Medieval Europe , 500-1500”, in A. Wear, ed., Medicine in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 59-90. COURSE PACK

Victoria Sweet, “Hildegard of Bingen and the Greening of Medieval Medicine”, Bulletin for the History of Medicine 73 (1999), 381-403. COURSE PACK

Lawrence Conrad, “Arabic Medicine”, in W. Bynum and R. Porter, eds., Companion Encyclopaedia to the History of Medicine (London: Routledge, 1990), Vol. I, 676-727. COURSE PACK

WEEK THREE : Early Modern Medicine I: The Revolution of Celestial Bodies

* Magic
* Alchemy
* Heresy
* Experience vs. experiment

Primary Readings :

Paracelsus, “Seven Arguments”, from the Source Book of Medical History (Logan Clendening, ed., New York: Dover, 1942), COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

Brian Copenhaver, “Natural magic, hermetism, and occultism in early modern science”, in D. Lindberg and Robert Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261-302. COURSE PACK

Harold Cook, “The new philosophy and medicine in seventeenth-century England ”, in D. Lindberg and Robert Westman, eds, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 397-436. COURSE PACK

Nathan Sivin, “Science and Medicine in Imperial China --The State of the Field”, The Journal of Asian Studies , Vol. 47, No. 1. (Feb., 1988), pp. 41-90.

WEEK FOUR : Early Modern Medicine II: The Revolution of Terrestrial Bodies

* 1543
* Anatomy
* Blood Circulation

Primary Readings :

Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, trans. J.B. de C.M. Saunders and Charles D. O'Malley (World Publishing, 1950), COURSE PACK

William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood and Other Writings, from the Source Book of Medical History (Logan Clendening, ed., New York: Dover, 1942), COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

Giovanna Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna ”, Past and Present , No. 117. (Nov., 1987), pp. 50-106.

Nancy G. Siraisi, “Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology”, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Spring, 1997), pp. 1-37.

Luke Wilson, “William Harvey's Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy”, Representations , No. 17, Special Issue: The Cultural Display of the Body. (Winter, 1987), pp. 62-95.

Christopher Hill, “William Harvey and the Idea of Monarchy”, Past and Present, No. 27. (Apr., 1964), pp. 54-72.

Michael Stolberg, "A Woman Down to Her Bones: The Anatomy of Sexual Difference in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Isis 94 (2003), 274-299
See also replies, THOMAS W. LAQUEUR : Sex in the Flesh- and LONDA SCHIEBINGER : Skelettestreit ]

WEEK FIVE : The Enlightenment: A New World of Learning

* Scotland
* America
* Collecting

Primary Readings :

Selections from William Heberden, Medical Commentaries ( London , 1802), HANDOUT

La Mettrie, “The System of Materialism”, reading from The Enlightenment , ed. Frank Manuel. COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

Guenter Risse, “Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment”, in A. Wear, ed., Medicine in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149-195. COURSE PACK

Christopher Lawrence, “Ornate Physicians and Learned Artisans: Edinburgh Medical Men 1726-1776”, in W. Bynum and R. Porter, eds., William Hunter and the Eighteenth Century Medical World ( Cambridge , 1985), 153-76. COURSE PACK

Sidney Hart; David C. Ward, “The Waning of an Enlightenment Ideal: Charles Willson Peale's Philadelphia Museum , 1790-1820”, Journal of the Early Republic , Vol. 8, No. 4. (Winter, 1988), pp. 389-418.

Brian Dolan , “Malthus's Political Economy of Health: The critique of Scandinavia in the Essay on Population”, in B. Dolan, ed., Malthus, Medicine, & Morality: ‘Malthusianism' after 1798 (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, November 2000), pp. 9-32. COURSE PACK

WEEK SIX : The Emergence of the Medical Marketplace and Patient Experience

* (Slide Show)
* Alternative Healing
* Quackery

Primary Readings :

George Cheyne, An Essay on Health and Long Life (8th edn, London , G. Strahan, 1733), i-xx; 'Contents'; 1-16; 227-232. COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient's Progress (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989)

Roy Porter, Health for Sale : Quackery in England 1660-1850 (Manchester University Press, 1989), chapter one. COURSE PACK

Colin Jones, “The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution”, The American Historical Review , Vol. 101, No. 1. (Feb., 1996), pp. 13-40.

Irving Loudon, “The Vile Race of Quacks with which this Country is Infested”, in W. Bynum and R. Porter, eds, Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 106-128. COURSE PACK

WEEK SEVEN : Industrialization and Environmentalism

* Epidemic Constitution
* Miasma
* Experiments on Air

Readings :

John Pickstone, Medicine and Industrial Society (Manchester University Press, 1985), chapters 1 & 2. COURSE PACK

James Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), Chapters 1 & 2. COURSE PACK

Brian Dolan , “Conservative politicians, radical philosophers and the aerial remedy for the diseases of civilization”, History of the Human Sciences 15 (2) (2002), 35-54. COURSE PACK

WEEK EIGHT: Health in America

Primary Readings :

“Benjamin Rush Tells His Medical Students at the University of Pennsylvania of the Trials and Rewards of a Medical Career, 1803”

“Walter Channing, a Harvard Medical Professor, Warns of the Dangers of Women Practicing Midwifery, 1820”

“The Philadelphia Medical Marketplace”, by Lisa Rosner

“Samuel Cartwright, a Medical Professor and Racial Theorist, Reports to the Medical Association of Louisiana on the ‘Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race', 1851”

all selection from John Harley Warner and Janet Tighe, eds., Major Problems in the History of American Medicine and Public Health (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). COURSE PACK

Secondary Readings :

Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982), chapter 1. COURSE PACK

James Cassidy, Medicine in America , a Short History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), chapter 1. COURSE PACK

Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations , ( Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2002), chapter 1. COURSE PACK

WEEK NINE : Normal and the Pathological in the Birth of the Clinic

Readings:

Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (Zone edition, 1989), pp. 115-149. COURSE PACK

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (Routledge, 1986 edition), ‘Signs and Cases'. COURSE PACK

Talcott Parsons, “Definitions of Health and Illness in the Light of American Values and Social Structure”, in A. Caplan, et al, Concepts of Health and Disease: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 1981). COURSE PACK

WEEK TEN : Nineteenth-Century Reform and Resistance

Readings :

William Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 92-141. COURSE PACK

Alison Winter, “Harriet Martineau and the Reform of the Invalid in Victorian England ”, The Historical Journal , Vol. 38, No. 3. (Sep., 1995), pp. 597-616.

Adrian Desmond , “Artisan Resistance and Evolution in Britain , 1819-1848”, Osiris , 2nd Series, Vol. 3. (1987), pp. 77-110.

Steven Shapin, "Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh ," Annals of Science , 32 (1975). 219-243.