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Department of History and Philosophy of Science

 

Paper manager: Salim Al-Gailani

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

Michaelmas Term
Science in the Making of Modern Medicine
Salim Al-Gailani (8)
Mon 12noon (weeks 1–4)
Tue 2pm (weeks 1–4)
Histories of Global and International Health
Mary Brazelton (4)
Mon 12noon (weeks 5–8)
Science and Medicine since World War I
Salim Al-Gailani (4)
Tue 2pm (weeks 5–8)
Lent Term
Medicine, Race and Ethnicity
Staffan Müller-Wille (4)
Mon 12noon (weeks 1–4)
Science and Medicine since World War I (continued)
Salim Al-Gailani (4)
Tue 2pm (weeks 1–4)
Biology: Lab and Field
Edwin Rose (1), Staffan Müller-Wille (3), Dmitriy Myelnikov (4)
Mon 12noon (weeks 5–8)
Tue 2pm (weeks 5–8)

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

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

Mary Brazelton (4 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

These lectures offer a survey of the history of international and global health, beginning with the colonial origins of global health and moving on to discuss new forms of international solidarity and competition over the 20th and early 21st centuries. The lectures offer overviews of key topics and institutions long considered central to the project of international health, as well as socialist projects that contributed to critical alternative visions of world health. The lectures end with a consideration of global health's enmeshment with new forms of industrialisation, activism and state power.

Science and Medicine since World War I

Salim Al-Gailani (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, global health and post-colonial medicine, as well as critiques of medical science.

Medicine, Race and Ethnicity

Staffan Müller-Wille (4 lectures, Lent 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.

Biology: Lab and Field

Edwin Rose, 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

 

Resources for Paper 3 on Moodle