- Department: History
- Module co-ordinator: Dr. Sethina Watson
- Credit value: 40 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2021-22
- See module specification for other years: 2022-23
From ’flu to plague, e-coli to ebola and Covid, diseases are the most mundane of human experiences and the most catastrophic. Scholars speak of the long history of human societies in terms of environment, microbes, and technology (‘guns, germs and steel’); this module explores all three, via the dislocations that produce ill health and the systems that respond. If this offers a ‘big history’ of humanity, it also asks for close study of different societies, for illness (leprosy, tuberculosis, Spanish flu, polio, HIV/AIDS, dementia) could shape an era and its institutions, defining who was excluded and who embraced. The language of illness also offers a pervasive and powerful rhetoric, with all kinds of behaviour described as “sick” or as producing ill health in certain social groups. To study disease is to explore how society distinguished the normal from the abnormal from the pathological.
The module will investigate three contrasting perspectives on disease in history: the epidemiological, the social and the cultural. The first thinks about the movement of diseases in populations; how has the high mortality of plague, smallpox or tuberculosis restructured economies or global politics? The second investigates social, governmental and medical responses to ill health including quarantine and public health policy, paying particular attention to questions of power, conflict, and colonialism. Finally, many diseases have had powerful psycho-cultural dimensions, because of frightening symptoms (cholera, ebola), apocalyptic threat (bubonic plague, SARS) or the cultural significance attributed to them (leprosy, syphilis, cancer), especially when aspects of the human condition are diagnosed as sickness (addiction, hysteria, sexualities). Throughout we notice how diagnosis defines not what is considered pathological or wrong, but also the patient themselves; it is intertwined with how society articulates morality and how it marks out gender, race, sexuality, class, and so identity itself.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Autumn Term 2021-22 to Spring Term 2021-22 |
The aims of this module are:
Students who complete this module successfully will:
Teaching Programme:
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1 of the autumn term, and a 3-hour seminar in weeks 2-5 and 7-9 of the autumn term and weeks 2-5 and 7-10 of the spring term. Both the autumn and spring terms include a reading week for final year students and so there will be no teaching in week 6. Students prepare for and participate in fifteen three-hour seminars.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
1. Can diseases have a history?
2. Approaching Disease
3. Plagues in History: Epidemic Disaster & Virgin Soils
4. Plagues and people: Panic and Response
5. Disease Control and Conflict
6. Health, Wealth & Mortality Decline
7. Writing 'plague' in film and history
8. Sex and Disease
9. Pollution: Lepers and outcasts
10. Whose disease? My/your disease, or a disease
11. Culture clash: diagnosis and authority
12. Social Construction of Disease
13. Institutions and Regimen
14. Climate and foreign climes
15. Metaphor and visualisation
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Groupwork Project |
N/A | 33 |
Online Exam - 24 hrs (Centrally scheduled) 24-Hour Open Exam |
8 hours | 67 |
None
For procedural work, the students will make group presentations towards the end of the autumn term. In addition, they may choose to submit an optional 2,000 word formative essay between weeks 7-9 of the autumn term. Essays should not be submitted in the same week as group project presentations are scheduled.
For summative assessment students will complete a 4,000-word group project due in week 6 of the spring term -- this will account for 33% of the final mark. They will then also take a 2,000-word 24-hour open exam during the common assessment period in the summer term, usually released at 11:00 on day 1 and submitted at 11:00 on day 2. The open exam will be worth 67% of the final mark.
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Groupwork Project |
N/A | 33 |
Online Exam - 24 hrs (Centrally scheduled) 24-Hour Open Exam |
8 hours | 67 |
Following their formative assessment task, students will receive feedback that will include comments and a mark. If this takes the form of live feedback in class it will be supported by a written comment sheet.
All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their procedural work during their tutor’s student hours. For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 20 working days of the submission. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.
For term time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:
Pandemic disease in the medieval world: rethinking the Black Death. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019.
Richard McKay. Patient zero and the making of the AIDS epidemic. Chicago: University Press, 2017.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1979, repr. 1983.