Syllabus

Course Description

This course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics include histories of bodies and embodiment in medicine; institutional and social genealogies and futures for genes and genomes; the role of science and medicine in racial formation; epidemics and emergent diseases; new reproductive technologies and socialities; the laboratory and field lives of animals, plants, microbes, molecules, and environments.

Requirements

This is a seminar. Students are required to give at least one seminar presentation, offering a critical evaluation of positions represented in the readings for their chosen day. There are two writing assignments: a short paper (5 pages) on course readings up through week 6, and a 15-20 page paper that can be either (A) a research paper using course materials to discuss a case study of interest to you, or (B) a more extended argumentative literature review. A prospectus for this paper will be due in week 9 and the final paper will be due in week 14, in time for our class conference.

Grading

Required Texts

The readings are a mix of books and articles or chapters. We recommend purchasing:

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999. ISBN: 0942299892.

Lock, Margaret. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN: 0520226054.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN: 0674008251.

Jones, David S. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0674013050.

Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ISBN: 0807825840.

Hacking, Ian. Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0813918235.

Rader, Karen. Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0691016364.

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN: 0393038726.

Thompson, Charis. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 0262201569.

Pressman, Jack C. Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0521353718.

Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0674014871.

Class Schedule