The History of Medicine

This student interest-driven course will provide an introduction for students interested in Healthcare and intersecting fields. Students will examine aspects of healthcare and medicine and have the opportunity to explore different professions. This course will provide the students with the ability to analyze issues and policy, engage with medical ethics, and refine effective communication. Our primary focus will be for students to develop a foundational understanding of the History of Medicine. Students will survey the rise of medicine in the West from classical times to the present. They are covering both the social and scientific history of medicine, tracing the chronology of key developments and events while at the same time engaging with the issues, discoveries and controversies that have beset and characterized medical progress. Students will be asked to make connections between disease, healthcare workers (such as doctors), primary care, surgery, the rise of hospitals, drug treatment and pharmacology, mental illness, and psychiatry. Their self-directed week-long project will ask students to emphasize the crucial developments of the past 200 years while examining their roots in classical, medieval, Islamic, and East Asian medicine.