- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: I
- Academic year of delivery: 2022-23
What is ‘modern’ about modern medicine? How is the history of health and disease related to wider historical contexts such as revolution, industrialisation and globalization? This course looks at the factors prompting changes in medical knowledge and practice from the eighteenth century to the present day. It focuses on the rise of scientific medicine and explores the increasing importance of empirical observation, experiment, statistics and technology for understandings of the body, disease and its treatment. At the same time, it explores the ethical issues generated by the rise of laboratory medicine. The growth of medical research from the late 18th century generated questions about the use of cadavers for dissection and the value of live animals and human beings for experiments and clinical trials. The increasing centrality of the laboratory to medicine gave rise to drugs that created new opportunities for profit, reformulated definitions of disease and transformed the relationship between doctors and their patients.
Historians do not tell the story of the rise of scientific medicine as a story of unfettered progress. This course considers the changes to medical care and knowledge that have been wrought by a shift to scientific modes of knowledge production, placing these in their wider historical context, and considers the ways in which scientific medicine has helped shape the modern world.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Autumn Term 2022-23 |
The aims of this module are:
Students who complete this module successfully will:
Teaching Programme:
This 20-credit module consists of sixteen twice weekly lectures delivered in weeks 2-9, plus one round-up session in week 10 and eight 90 minute discussion groups.
Lecture topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
From bedside to laboratory medicine
The Birth of the Clinic
Grave-robbing, surgery and the poor
Public health and political economy
The rise of research in Germany
Physiology and animal experiments
Was there a bacteriological revolution?
Medicine and Empire
Technology in the hospital
The impact of the laboratory
Human experimentation
Ethics
Who pays for medical research?
Who regulates medical research?
HIV/AIDS
The contraceptive pill
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Students will be required to write a 2,000-word procedural essay for formative assessment, due in either week 5 or week 7 of the autumn term. They will then complete a 2,000-word essay for summative assessment, due in week 1 of the spring term.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
Following their formative assessment task, students will typically receive written feedback that will include comments and a mark within 10 working days of submission.
Work will be returned to students in their discussion groups and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their procedural work with their tutor (or module convenor) during 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 deadline. 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:
Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity. Fontana Press, 1999.
Harrison, Mark. Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.
Brunton, Deboarh (Ed). Medicine Transformed: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1800-1930. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.