Part II Paper 3: Modern Medicine and Life Sciences

Paper manager: Nick Hopwood (Michaelmas and Easter); Dmitriy Myelnikov (Lent)

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

What is life and how can we intervene in it? These questions have guided much of medicine, biology and their interaction since 1750. This paper explores the making of the large enterprises that today seek to control organic matter, bodies, populations and ecosystems. The 19th century witnessed the creation of new medical institutions, professionals and practices. In the 20th century, biomedicine built upon this legacy to become a major object of economic, political and ethical concern. Biology was made a distinct science of life with roles in classifying and manipulating humans and other organisms in laboratories and clinics, cities and field sites.

Aims and learning outcomes

• to familiarise students with fundamental issues in historical writing on medicine and the life sciences since 1750;
• to provide students with an understanding of the principal changes that created modern medical and biological institutions, professionals, practices and concepts;
• to prompt assessments of the roles of social, cultural, institutional and national dimensions of medicine, the life sciences and their interrelations;
• to equip students with the critical tools to evaluate historical and contemporary developments in medicine and the life sciences.

Lectures

Science in the Making of Modern Medicine

Nick Hopwood (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, including through pathological anatomy, germ theories, vaccines and x-rays. We investigate how relations between doctors, individual patients and general publics changed, and explore the role of medicine in managing the health of populations.

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, Dmitriy Myelnikov (8 lectures, Michaelmas & Lent Terms)

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, the oral contraceptive pill and in vitro fertilization, as well as critiques of medical science.

Histories of International and Global Health

Rosanna Dent (4 lectures, Lent Term)

This course introduces the histories of current approaches to global health. Beginning with colonial origins in tropical medicine, topics include the rise of international health organisations, 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 productive potential of humanitarianism, biosecurity, solidarity-based community health and targeted technological interventions.

Biology: Lab and Field

Staffan Müller-Wille, Dmitriy Myelnikov (8 lectures, Lent Term)

Natural history in the 18th and 19th centuries was a science of classification, which studied life at the level of the organism. The growth of an independent discipline of biology brought with it a focus on new scales. Biologists in the lab, spurred by the discovery of genetic regularities in inheritance, developed a fascination with the molecular and sought to understand the substructure of life. Biologists in the field, building on the legacy of 19th-century exploration, sought to understand, predict and manipulate large-scale – eventually global – environmental processes. These lectures trace the intersections of the large and the small in biological practice and discuss their conceptual and practical ramifications.

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)
• Creager, Angela, Life Atomic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
• * 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)
• * Jacob, François, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
• Kohler, Robert, Landscapes and Labscapes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
• * 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)
• * 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)
• * 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 Paper 3 on Moodle