Module Convenor 2024-25: Elise Smith

Term: Spring (Weeks 11-20, but no meeting in Reading Week)

Time: Tuesdays, 13:00-15:00

Context of Module

Module Aims

Intended Learning Outcomes

Module Approach: Student Led Learning

Syllabus

Assessment

 

 

Context of Module

'Matters of Life and Death' is the Term Two core module for the MA in the History of Medicine. The module, taught in the Spring Term, may also be taken by students following any other MA programme in the History Department. 'Matters of Life and Death' will address a range of topics in the history of medicine via selected books and articles authored by teaching and research staff in the Centre for the History of Medicine and Department of History. In each seminar, they will be joined by the author of the week's text(s). Student-led discussions with the authors will enable close study and reflection on each text's sources, methodologies and historiographical and theoretic approaches. This will enable students to consider the emergence of new histories of health, embodiment and medical history, as well as the new challenges of work in the medical humanities. All students are encouraged to relate the module's discussions to their own dissertation research and approaches.

Module Aims

The principal aim of this module is to enrich the work our students do (in terms of reading, learning, research and writing) for the History of Medicine MA programme, and to support them specifically in developing wide and deep expertise in fields and methodologies related to their individual MA dissertations. Students planning to join the module in Term Two are welcome to contact Elise Smith (module convener) in advance if they have any questions about the module approach, structure, readings, or assessments.

Intended Learning Outcomes

• Review the advanced literature in a variety of areas in the history of medicine and the medical humanities.
• Assess the theoretical underpinnings of this work.
• Draw on key concepts from one or more of the social, human and literary sciences.
• Work confidently with a wide variety of relevant primary source material.

Module Approach: Student Led Learning

The 'Matters of Life and Death' module provides the opportunity for students to analyse a series of issues in the history of medicine in depth, responding to a broad range of student interest in histories of the body and mind, gender and medicine, public health, disease, disability, race and science. Each seminar introduces students to an important recent contribution to the field of the history of medicine, and provides the opportunity to discuss this work with the authors. This will enable students to develop an understanding of how the field is now evolving in tackling issues of life and death. It will also develop critical thinking about the challenges in undertaking such historical work. An introductory seminar will focus on strategy for interviewing historians about their work and its situation within the field. It will allocate roles, discuss areas for questions and a structure for the seminars, and identify further readings and reviews to assist analysis of the core texts. The emphasis will be on equipping students to take a lead in the organisation and intellectual direction of the seminars. The seminars in Weeks 2-9 will put these plans into operation. These seminars will centre on reading a book or articles written (or being written) by a member of staff in History of Medicine at Warwick. All texts are accessible electronically via the Warwick Library. The final seminar in Week 10 will give students the opportunity to present their own research ideas, building on the intersecting themes, conclusions and methods that have been presented throughout the term. Students will be encouraged to draw from the seminars and the readings in their essays for the module. The subjects and titles of these essays will need to be agreed with the module convenor.

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction (Elise Smith)

Reading:

• • Roger Cooter with Claudia Stein, Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.

'Making the "Turns"'

Week 2: AIDS and Visual Culture (Claudia Stein)

This session will focus on the question how cultural historians like myself and my co-author Roger Cooter ‘made meaning’ of a devastating epidemic which, at least in Western societies today, has faded from public consciousness and seems ‘forgotten’? We will discuss why we decided to focus on a striking visual object, the public health poster. The printed poster experienced a renaissance during the epidemic and became, once again, a major tool for ‘educating’ the public about the new STD. But such colourful posters also soon became collectors’ items, sought after objects to be exhibited in museums and galleries to keep the memory of epidemic alive. What can a poster tell historians about its own ‘social life’ and the lives of those, suffering through the epidemic?

Reading:

• • Visual Objects and Universal Meanings: AIDS Posters and the Politics of Globalization’, Medical History, 55,1 (2011): 85-108 (with Roger Cooter)
  • Positioning the Image of Aids’, Endeavour, 34, (2010): 12-15 (with Roger Cooter)

  • Visual Imagery and Epidemics in the Twentieth Century,’ in David Serlin (ed), Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 169-192 (with Roger Cooter)

  • Coming into Focus: Posters, Power, and Visual Culture in the History of Medicine’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 42 (2007): 180-209 (with Roger Cooter)

 

Claudia has also suggested a few further readings to ground you in this field:

Berridge, Virginia, AIDS in the UK: The Making of Policy, 1981-1994 (Oxford, 1996).

Epstein, Steven, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Chicago, 1989)

Gilman, Sander, The Beautiful Body and AIDS, In Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, Balimore, 1995, pp. 115-72.

Sturken, Marita, and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction into Visual Culture. Oxford, 2001.

Week 3: (Re)Writing Early Modern Medicine (Sophie Mann)

Reading:

'Introduction' and 'Chapter One' from Double Nature, Double Care: Religion and Medicine in Early Modern England (Sophie's book manuscript in preparation! -- to be provided in week 2).

Week 4: Migration and Medicine (Roberta Bivins)

This week we will explore different strengths and structures of monographs and articles as forms of communication in scholarly history

Reading:

• • Contagious Communities: Medicine, Migration, and the NHS in Post War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

OR

Four from among the below:

• • 'Suspect' screening: the limits of Britain's medicalised borders, 1962-1981. in Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer and Paul Weindling, (eds),

    Medicalising borders: Selection, containment and quarantine since 1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021).

  • 'Re-writing the ‘English disease’: Migration, Ethnicity and ‘Tropical Rickets’, in Mark Jackson (ed.), The Routledge History of Disease (London: Routledge, 2016).
  • 'Ideology and Disease Identity: The Politics of Rickets, 1929-1982', Medical Humanities, 39.2 (Dec 2013).
  • 'Immigration, ethnicity and ‘public’ health policy in postcolonial Britain', in Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland, eds, Migration, Health and Illness in the Modern World (London: Palgrave, 2013) 126-150.
  • 'Coming "Home" to (post)Colonial Medicine: Tropical Bodies in Post-War Britain', Social History of Medicine 2012; doi: 10.1093/shm/hks058.
  • '"The English Disease" or "Asian Rickets": Medical Responses to Post-Colonial Immigration', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 81.3 (Autumn, 2007), 533-568.

Week 5: Mathew Thomson Making Up (Psychological) People

Reading:

Mathew Thomson. Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006,

Week 6: Reading Week

Week 7: Global Science James Poskett

Week 8: Seeing Soviet Minds (Anna Toropova) Mass Culture and the Psy-disciplines in the Soviet Union 

Readings:

• Anna Toropova, ‘Introduction’, (with Claire Shaw), Technologies of the Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 1-26.  

• Anna Toropova ‘Rest for the Brain or Technology of the Unconscious?: Hypnosis in Early Soviet Medicine and Culture’, in Technologies of the Mind and Body in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 29-50 

• Anna Toropova, ‘The Hypnotic Screen: The Early Soviet Experiment with Film Psychotherapy’, Social History of Medicine, 35.3 (2022): 946-971, open access, DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkac031 

• Anna Toropova, Excerpts from book manuscript in preparation: Cinema, the Human Sciences and the Transformation of Mind and Body in the Early Soviet Union (these will be made available in the preceding week).

Week 9: Environmental History and Interdisciplinary Approaches (Katayoun Shafiee)

Reading:

• • Shafiee, Katayoun. Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2018.

Week 10: Curating Medicine (Elise Smith and Roberta Bivins).

Students will travel to a museum or heritage site to meet curators and discuss how histories of medicine and health are presented to general audiences.

 

Information
Tutor/s	Elise Smith (convenor); Roberta Bivins; Sophie Mann; James Poskett; Katayoun Shafiee Claudia Stein; Mathew Thomson; Anna Toropova;
Term	Spring
Tutorial Day	Tuseday, 13:00-15:00
Time Venue	TBA