LHUMK

Disease and Society from Antiquity to the Present

 Mondays 6-8

Medical Humanities Conference Room

Freeway Medical Building, 5th floor

Laura Ackerman Smoller, Ph.D.

Office hours:  Tues., 1-3

Phone:  569-8389

email:  lasmoller@ualr.edu

http://www.ualr.edu/lasmoller/

 

Week 1.  August 20.  Introduction:  Ways of thinking about disease and society.

 Week. 2. August 27.  Disease as an agent of historical change.

             Reading: William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1975), pp. 1-13, 132-165; “AIDS Transforms Life, Family Structure in Lesotho,” Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR), August 6, 2006; “Access to HIV Drug Therapies Remains Limited,” Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR), August 13, 2006.

             Lecture:  A history of histories of disease.

 Week 3.  September 3.  Labor Day holiday.

 Week 4.  September 10.  The "social construction" of disease.

             Reading:  Elaine Showalter, Hystories:  Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York, 1997), pp. 115-32;

            Burkhard Bilger, “Letter from Kentucky:  Squirrel and Man,” The New Yorker (July 17, 2000): 58-67.

             Lecture:  Disease and "Others."

 Week 5.  September 17.  Different cultures, different understandings of disease.

            Reading:  Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down:  A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures  (New York:  The Noonday Press, 1997), pp. vii-ix, 1-11, 20-23, 38-49, 140-53, 171-80, 250-61 (optional:  278-88).

             Lecture:  Disease and medicine in the ancient world.

Week 6.  September 24.  No class.  

            Activity:  Media watch.  Watch or read a film, TV show, magazine article, news story, or web site that gets at the interaction between disease and society/culture.  Write a one-page summary, focusing on either the impact of disease on society or the “social construction” of disease in the piece.  You may be asked to present your findings to the class.

 Week. 7.  October 1.  The Hippocratic understanding of disease.

             Reading:  Hippocrates, Epidemics, book 1:  1-3, in J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, trans., Hippocratic Writings, pp. 87-89; The Sacred Disease, ibid., pp. 237-51;  Hippocratic Oath.

            “Cures of Apollo and Asclepius,” in Georg Luck, ed. and trans., Arcana Mundi:  Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Baltimore and London:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 142-45.

                        Lecture:  The medieval view of disease.

 Week 8.  October 8.   Leprosy in the medieval world.

             Reading:  R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), pp. 45-65, 73-80.

            Ritual of Separation of a Leper, from the Old Sarum Rite.

            Michael Dols, “The Leper in Medieval Islamic Society,” Speculum 58 (1983):  891-916 (selections).

             Lecture:  The experience of plague.

 Week 9.  October 15.  Plague in late medieval and Renaissance Europe.

             Reading:  Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., The Black Death Transformed:  Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London, 2003), pp. 1-24, 41-54, 223-33, 250-52.

            Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, introduction, in Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (Manchester, UK, 1994), pp. 26-34.

           Lecture:  The emergence of the "French pox."

 Week 10.  October 22.  No class.

             Activity:  Media watch.  Watch or read a film, TV show, magazine article, news story, or web site that gets at the interaction between disease and society/culture.  Write a one-page summary, focusing on either the impact of disease on society or the “social construction” of disease in the piece.  You may be asked to present your findings to the class.

Week 11.  October 29.  Syphilis in early modern Europe.

             Reading:  Anna Foa, "The New and the Old:  The Spread of Syphilis (1494-1530)," trans. Carole C. Gallucci, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective.  Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 26-45.

            (optional extra reading:  Winfried Schleiner, "Infection and Cure through Women:  Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis,"  Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994):  499-517.)

             Lecture: Lecture:  The cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century.

 Week 12.  November 5. Cholera.

              Reading:  Richard J. Evans, "Epidemics and Revolutions:  Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Terrence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas, as above, pp. 149-73.

            (optional:  Edgar Allen Poe, “The Mask of the Red Death”)

             Lecture:  The progressive era and the science of eugenics

 Week 13.  November 12. “Degeneracy,” “defectives,” euthanasia, and eugenics.

             Reading:  Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork:  Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York and Oxford, 1996), pp. 1-18, 81-99.

             Lecture:  Feminism, the “new woman,” and gender anxiety in the late 19^th century.

 Week 14.  November 19. Hysteria and its treatments.

             Reading:  Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm:  “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), ch. 1, pp. 1-20 (optional pp. 67-110);

Elaine Showalter, Hystories:  Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York, 1997), pp. 30-48.

             Lecture:  The emergence of AIDS.

 Week 15.  November 26. Venereal diseases in modern America.

             Reading:  Allan M. Brandt, "The Syphilis Epidemic and Its Relation to AIDS,"  Science 239 (1988):  375-80;

Upton Sinclair and Eugene Brieux, Damaged Goods (1913),  pp. 10-19, 26-29, 40-41  (entire text on-line at:  http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1157);

Paul Monette, Borrowed Time:  An AIDS Memoir (San Diego, New York, and London, 1988), pp. 1-26.

Max Brantley, “Dumb and Dumber,” Arkansas Times (July 14, 2005): 16.

             Lecture:  The coming plague?

 Week 16.  December 3. Emerging threats.

             Reading:  Laurie Garrett,  “The Next Pandemic?”  Foreign Affairs 84 (July/August 2005):  3ff (printout from Academic Search Premier).

            “International groups fly to Angola to try and stop the spread of Marburg fever,” Morning Edition (transcript), April 13, 2005.

            Sharon LaFraniere and Deniise Grady, “Stalking a Deadly Virus, Battling a Town’s Fears,”New York Times, April 17, 2005.

            “Health professionals in Kano, Nigeria, still have reservations about the Western-led polio immunization campaign,”  Morning Edition (transcript), April 13, 2005.

 Course requirements for UAMS seniors:

          Attendance at all weekly discussions.  (Please make alternative arrangements with me if you will be on an away rotation or at a residency interview.)

•           Completion of all reading assignments.

•           A 1 to 2-page reading response, to be handed in on the Monday each reading assignment is discussed.  I will grade these responses on a 10-point scale.  I am looking for:  1) a brief summary of the reading(s);  2) some critique of the reading, a comparison with another reading or a current situation,  and/or some question(s) for discussion that arises from the reading (e.g., “I think McNeill overstates the case for disease’s role in history because . . . .” or “The experiences of leprosy and plague seem very similar in that . . . .” or “Do you think leprosaria would work for AIDS patients?”); and 3) specific quotations or examples from the readings.     An adequate summary will result in a score of 7 points; adding elements 2) and 3) will result in scores of 8, 9, and 10.

 Grading:

 --Grades for UAMS students will be computed as follows:

 Reading responses                                                                    60%

Class participation                                                                    40%

            A=90-100%    B=80-89%       C=70-79%      D=60-69%      F=0-59%

 In case of some mix-up, it is a good idea to save all returned work until you receive your grade at the end of the semester.

 Classroom etiquette:   Please turn off cell phones and beepers before entering the classroom or set them to a silent alert.  In the rare event you must enter late or leave class early, please let me know in advance.           

 Cheating and plagiarism:  Cheating and plagiarism are serious offenses and will be treated as such.  ("Plagiarism" means "to adopt and reproduce as one's own, to appropriate to one's use, and incorporate in one's own work without acknowledgment the ideas of others or passages from their writings and works."  See Section VI, Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities and Behavior, Student Handbook, p. 39.  Copying directly from the textbook or an encyclopedia article without quotation marks or an identifying citation, for example, constitutes plagiarism.)  Anyone who engages in such activities will receive no credit for that assignment and may in addition be turned over to the Academic Integrity and Grievance Committee for University disciplinary action, which may include separation from the University.

Copyright notice:  Copyright Ó by Laura Smoller as to this syllabus and all lectures.  Students and auditors are prohibited from selling notes during this course to (or being paid for taking notes by) any person or commercial firm without the express written permission of the professor teaching this course.