HIS 525SEM - Cul Hist Science & Med

This seminar will provide an intensive introduction to major historiographical issues and approaches in scholarly work on the history of science and medicine, including attempts to write cultural histories of specific facets of science and medicine. The course is intended to serve the needs of a broad range of students from history and from disciplines such as anthropology and literature, who have an interest in science, medicine, technical knowledge and practices, the body, sexuality, disability studies, or related topics and their relationship to culture and society. We shall focus chiefly upon the cultural history of medicine, with special attention given to the history of the body and sexuality from antiquity to postmodern cyberculture. We’ll address such topics as the body in ancient Greek and Chinese medical traditions; medicine, natural philosophy, and notions of sexual difference in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Europe; the female body, the saintly body, and the criminal body in late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Europe; monsters, marvels, and monstrous bodies from the 13th through the 18th centuries; the new cultural history of Renaissance anatomy; women, gender, and the birth of modern political economy; race, gender, and ¿other¿ bodies in European and American scientific and medical discourses; hermaphrodites and the scientific study of sexuality from the late Renaissance to the 20th century in Europe and America; Foucault’s History of Sexuality; and such issues as virtual surgery, technoscientifically altered human bodies and disability studies, informatics, and the ¿posthuman¿ body.

Credits: 3