LHUMK
Disease and Society
from Antiquity to the Present
Mondays 6-8 (UAMS
students)
Medical Humanities
Conference Room
Freeway Medical Building, 5th floor
Laura Ackerman Smoller, Ph.D.
Office hours: Wednesday, 3-4, Friday, 2:30-3:30, and by appointment
Office: Stabler Hall (UALR) 604K
Phone: 569-8389
email:
lasmoller@ualr.edu
http://www.ualr.edu/lasmoller
Week 1. August 24. Introduction: Ways of thinking about disease and
society.
Week 2. August 31. Disease as an agent of historical change.
Reading:
William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1975), pp. 1-13,
146-50, 160-65;
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
(New York, 1997), 13-14, 195-215.
Lecture: A history of histories of disease.
Week 3. September 7. Labor Day holiday.
Week 4. September 14. 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 21. 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 28. 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 7. October 5. 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;
Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, UK:
Boydell, 2006), pp. 13-29, 39-43 (optional: 302-14, 343).
Lecture: The experience of plague.
Week 8. October 12. Plague in early modern Europe.
Reading:
Carlo Cipolla, Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century
Tuscany (New York, 1979), pp. 1-85 (small pages and a fast read!).
Lecture: The emergence of the "French pox."
Week 9. October 19. 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.
Lecture: Disease, medicine, and society in early modern Europe.
Week 10. October 26. The fashionable disease of gout.
Reading:
Roy Porter, "Gout, Framing and Fantasizing Disease," Bulletin of the
History of Medicine 68 (1994): 1-28.
Lecture: The cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century.
Week 11. November 2. 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 12. November 9. "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 19th
century
Week 13. November 16. 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 14. November 23. 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.
Lecture: The coming plague?
Week 15. November 30. Emerging threats?
Reading:
Laurie Garrett, "The Next Pandemic?" Foreign Affairs 84
(July/August 2005): 3ff (printout from Academic Search Premier);
Vian Azzu, "Swine Flu: How Experts Are Preparing Their Families,"
New Scientist (August 12, 2009);
Jill Lepore, "It's Spreading: Outbreaks, Media Scares, and the Parrot
Panic of 1930," The New Yorker (June 1, 2009): 46-50.
Week 16. December 7. Disease in the media.
No reading! Dinner and a movie, followed by a discussion of the
portrayal of disease in the film.
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. All readings will be
distributed in class. Please make arrangements to pick up a copy of
the reading if you must miss a class.
-
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%
Grades are computed on the following scale:
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; do not read or send text messages in class.
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 a failing grade in the course and will be
turned over to the Academic Integrity and Grievance Committee for
University disciplinary action, which may include separation from the
University.
Copyright
notice:
Copyright © 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.
