Michaelmas Time Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday 10-11:30am Philosophy and ethics of medicine core Medical anthropology core 11.30am-2pm 2-3pm 3-3:30pm 3:30-4:30pm Medical sociology core (sociology of health and Illness) History of medicine core Lent Time Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday 10-11:30am PEM: Epistemology of medical research (1-4), Measuring health (5-8) MS: Reproduction, technology and society (1-4), The political economy of biomedical innovation (5-8) MA: Anthropologies of food and nutrition (1-4), Global health (5-8) 11.30am-2pm 3-4:30pm HoM: Reproduction (1-4), Public and environmental health (5-8) 1
History of medicine Title: History of medicine core Staff: Nick Hopwood, Lauren Kassell The course provides an advanced introduction to history of medicine by exploring some of the most interesting writing on the kinds of medicine practised in domestic sick rooms, on hospital wards and in laboratories. We shall assess the usefulness of the categories bedside medicine, hospital medicine, experimental medicine and biomedicine for understanding change and continuity between early modernity and the present day. One major theme will be the ways in which the social relations of medical encounters shaped knowledge of disease and the experience of illness. Another will be to grasp how ways of knowing and working in medicine have interacted and changed. Title: Reproduction Staff: Salim Al-Gailani, Rebecca Flemming, Lauren Kassell This module introduces the history of reproduction from antiquity to the present day. It takes a long view, asking when reproduction replaced generation as a framework for thinking about procreation and situating the rise of this historical field within the politics of medicine and the reproductive sciences. Topics include seeds and fertility, midwifery and women s medicine, conception and contraception. Title: Public and environmental health Staff: Mary Brazelton This module will introduce students to the histories and historiographies of public and environmental health, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern processes of industrialization, urbanization, and migration have shaped the health of peoples and environments around the world. After an orientation to the history of public health, we will examine these trends in the realms of environmental health, global health, and nutrition. Key themes include issues of risk to bodies, places, and populations; changing roles of expertise; and the authority of the state. 2
Medical anthropology Title: Medical anthropology core Location: Meyer Fortes Seminar Room, Department of Social Anthropology Staff: Maryon McDonald These core sessions will suggest some of the ways in which biomedicine - the self-consciously modern, scientific medicine that is now practised in many parts of the world is ethnographically interesting. Usually, a course in medical anthropology would begin with the exotic, and then work its way towards an anthropology of biomedicine. We begin here instead with some glimpses of the exotic assumptions and practices of biomedicine and then underline its exoticism through examples of other modes of healing. Title: Anthropologies of food and nutrition Staff: Branwyn Poleykett Anthropologists have long been fascinated by food as a site of symbolic meaning and cultural contestation. Medical anthropologists have drawn upon this intellectual heritage to better understand the impact of eating on human health worldwide and to ask questions about what food justice and sustainable global food systems could look like in practice. An introductory session on this course will outline the primary concerns of anthropological approaches to food, consumption, diet and nutrition. The second session moves on to several related points: the medicalisation of hunger in the mid twentieth century, competing explanations for the devastating impact of undernutrition on human health, how ethnography has revealed a proliferation of other explanations of hunger lodged in alternative local biologies, and the invention of humanitarian technologies of food and feeding. The third session then examines the global distribution of what are increasingly called metabolic diseases : diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Finally, a student-led seminar will focus on food justice and the politics of eating through an examination of how disparities in access to nutrition within and between societies reproduce and exacerbate social inequalities. Title: Global health Staff: Wenzel Geissler Global health frames medical activities on a larger than national scale, crossing state boundaries and transcending conventional understandings of sovereignty and citizenship. It replaces older ways of thinking transnational medical work - notably Imperial medicine, with its gradual transition from military medicine and conquest to colonial welfare and public health, and international public health, which took the nation and its public of citizens as givens and often involved a logic of postcolonial solidarity. Global health has a more equivocal rationale than its predecessors. It is not naïvely driven by the dream of health for all and pursuits of global justice. Market economics mingle with humanitarian interventionism; and security concerns, biological and military, engage with re-conceptualisations of society and life itself. We look at some of the assumptions and aims of global health, and some of its critics, and the changing anthropological engagements with this field in which anthropology and global health can be awkward allies. 3
Medical sociology Title: Medical sociology core (Health and Illness) Time: 2-3.30pm Mondays Location: 17 Mill Lane, Room G (2nd Floor) except week 3 (23 Oct): 17 Mill Lane, Room E (2nd floor) Staff: Darin Weinberg The module on the sociology of health and illness is comprised of four seminars. It is designed to thoroughly acquaint students with the profoundly social nature of human health, illness, and disease. On a more pragmatic level, it is meant to facilitate a solid grasp of the most fundamental debates in the field, and to inspire, encourage, and prepare students to contribute to these debates. Toward this end, we will consider several facets of the relationship between human society and human health and illness. Major themes will include: concepts of health and illness in comparative historical and cross cultural perspective; the therapeutic arts and sciences in comparative historical and cross cultural perspective; doctors, patients and biomedicine s competitors; the political economy of health and illness; the relationship between social marginality and mental pathology. Title: Reproduction, technology and society Time: 10-11.30 Tuesdays Staff: Noémie Merleau-Ponty, Robert Pralat, Marcin Smietana, Lucy van de Wiel Reproductive technologies such as IVF, egg freezing, surrogacy and gamete donation are often associated with new forms of parenting and fertility. However, these technologies are linked to more general shifts in our relationships to technology, biology, law, policy and ethics. The forms of social change related to the rapid routinisation of assisted reproduction are now the subject of a substantial and expanding sociological literature that is explored in this module using case studies that introduce key concepts, theories and methods. The political economy of biomedical innovation Time: 10-11.30 Tuesdays Staff: Stuart Hogarth This module enables students to understand social science perspectives on the contemporary bioeconomy. It will explore how the biomedical research enterprise is being reshaped by governments and corporations as they search for competitive advantage in an increasingly global bioeconomy. The module is interdisciplinary drawing inter alia on science and technology studies, socio-legal studies and political economy. Topics covered will include: the emergence of the idea of a knowledge-based economy, and its function as part of the neoliberal state project (the shift from government to governance); the concept of promissory science and the promotion of biotechnology as a frontier technology ; intersection between public policy and commercial strategy, and the changing relationships between governments, corporations and academic scientists; the role of regulation as a both a response to and a shaper of biotechnologies; the importance of intellectual property rights in the bioeconomy, the legalisation of patents on novel life-based technologies and the globalisation of the IP regime favoured by Western pharmaceutical companies through the TRIPS agreement. Philosophy and ethics of medicine 4
Title: Philosophy and ethics of medicine core Staff: Stephen John This core module will introduce students to philosophical perspectives on health, medicine and society. The main focus will be on medical ethics and the political philosophy of health. However, reflecting the interests of many members of the HPS Department, we will also consider how these topics relates to epistemological, conceptual and metaphysical issues in the philosophy of medicine. (Note that the optional modules on Medical Epistemologies and on Quantifying Health discuss some of these issues in more detail). Title: Epistemology of medical research Staff: Jacob Stegenga A fundamental aim of medical research is to make inferences about causes. Does eating meat cause cancer? Will this drug decrease my blood pressure? Do disease screening programs lower risk of death? Medical science has a variety of tactics to provide evidence for causal hypotheses, and these tactics raise a plethora of philosophical questions. For example, many epidemiological hypotheses are based on animal research. What are the conditions under which we can extrapolate findings in animals to conclusions about humans? Many statisticians and epidemiologists, especially in the evidence-based medicine community, claim that evidence from randomised controlled trials is the best kind of evidence for causal hypotheses, and other forms of evidence are less reliable. What s so special about the role of randomisation in medical research? Beyond such methodological questions, it is important to note that medical science occurs in a complicated social nexus. This social nexus forms the conditions under which medical science can achieve a degree of objectivity, but aspects of that social nexus threaten that very objectivity. This series of seminars addresses such questions pertaining to the epistemology of medical research. Title: Measuring health Staff: Anna Alexandrova, Gabriele Badano The goal of this module is to provide students with a solid understanding of philosophical debates concerning the definition of health, its measurement, and the relevance of these to public policy. In the first two sessions we discuss whether health can be defined in a value-free or value-laden way. The final two sessions focus on the Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY), a measure of health benefits that is widely used in both clinical research and healthcare resource allocation, to explore some of the difficult ethical and political questions it raises. 5