Modern Medicine and Biomedical Sciences

Minor Subject 114 in Part II Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS)
Part of the BBS Major Subject History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine

Part II students' guide: BBS options

Paper manager: Nick Hopwood

Lectures are held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

Born in hospitals, vaccinated, X-rayed, taking antibiotics, receiving transplants – medicine sets the parameters of our lives and provides one of the most important fields of action for science. We tend to take this for granted, but it is a recent innovation. These courses are about how, and with what consequences, a new, scientific medicine was made for the modern world.

Our focus is on western Europe and the United States, their empires and former colonies, because the medicine made here diverged from other medical systems to become internationally dominant – though frequently contested and often competed against.

Two longer lecture courses survey the roles of science in the 19th-century creation of modern medical institutions, professionals and practices, and in the 20th-century transformation of medicine into a major object of economic, political and ethical concern. Two shorter courses focus on global and international health and on medicine, race and ethnicity respectively.

Aims and learning outcomes

• to acquaint students with fundamental issues in historical writing on medicine and allied sciences since 1750;
• to provide students with an understanding of the principal changes that created the medical and biomedical institutions, professionals and practices of the modern world;
• to introduce students to the processes through which medicine was transformed into a major object of economic, political and ethical concern; and
• to encourage students to explore major themes in the historical relations between the sciences and modern medicine.

Lectures

Science in the Making of Modern Medicine

Nick Hopwood, Salim Al-Gailani (8 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

This course outlines the roles of the sciences in the making of modern medicine from the French Revolution to World War I. We explore the creation in the long 19th century of new institutions, especially hospitals and laboratories, and of new ways of understanding and treating disease. We investigate how relations between doctors, individual patients and general publics changed, and explore the role of medicine in managing the health of populations. We discuss how a medicine made largely in western Europe was exported around the world.

Histories of Global and International Health

Rosanna Dent (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

This course offers a survey of the history of international and global health. Beginning with colonial origins in tropical medicine, topics include the rise of International Health Organizations, the tensions of developmentalist and decolonising approaches, and the reconfiguration of global health in the wake of HIV/AIDS. We will examine the contradictions and challenges inherent in contrasting models for the field including humanitarianism, biosecurity, or solidarity-based community health, and targeted technological interventions. These lectures will provide an understanding of the complex historical origins of modern global health practices and programmes.

Medicine, Race and Ethnicity

Rosanna Dent (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

This course investigates scientific and medical constructions of race and ethnicity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lectures and readings will address the development of racial categories and their implications for biomedical research and therapies, the role of race in medicine under conditions of slavery and colonialism, and the lasting social and political implications of these historical processes.

Science and Medicine since World War I

Nick Hopwood, Salim Al-Gailani (8 lectures, Lent Term)

Though our medicine had in its essential features been made by World War I, only in the 20th century did it become a major economic and political concern, and a profession with far-reaching authority in the management and even definition of human life. Highlighting the turning points of World War II and the crisis of the 1970s, this course explores the roles of science in medicine and of medicine in science. We cover the invention of medical research and the 'biomedical complex', insulin and penicillin, global health and post-colonial medicine, as well as critiques of medical science.

Preliminary reading

• Bernard, Claude, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865 and later edns)
• Bynum, W.F., Science and the Practice of Medicine in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
• Comfort, Nathaniel, The Science of Human Perfection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012)
• * Epstein, Steven, Impure Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
• Fleck, Ludwik, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
• Henig, Robin Marantz, Pandora's Baby (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004)
• Kohler, Robert, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
• * Lawrence, Christopher, Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1994)
• Livingston, Julie, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
• Morange, Michel, A History of Molecular Biology, trans. Matthew Cobb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
• * Oudshoorn, Nelly, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones (London: Routledge, 1994)
• * Packard, Randall M., A History of Global Health (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016)
• Parthasarathy, Shobita, Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
• Pauly, Philip J., Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to Alfred Kinsey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
• * Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge: 1987 and later edns)
• Schiebinger, Londa, Secret Cures of Slaves (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017)
• * Skloot, Rebecca, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown, 2010)

Resources for Modern Medicine and Biomedical Sciences on Moodle