Fall 2025 | Yale University
An examination of the variety of approaches to the social and cultural history of medicine and public health. Readings are drawn from recent literature in the field, sampling writings on health care, illness experiences, knowledge production, and medical cultures in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the United States from antiquity through the twenty-first century. Topics include the role of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion in the experience of illness, suffering, and healing; medical epistemology and interactions among divergent understandings of the body; medicine, colonialism, and imperialism; and the role of the marketplace in shaping cultural authority, professional identities, and patient expectations.
General
Readings
September 2
Introduction
September 9
[\c] Nancy J. Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). ISBN: 9780674357082
September 16
[\a] Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 2002). ISBN: 9780942299892
September 23
[\c] Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006). ISBN: 9781890951689
September 30
[\c] Mary Fissell, Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion (New York: Seal Press, 2025). ISBN: 1541604075
October 7
[\c] Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). ISBN: 9781469630878
October 14
[\a] Elizabeth O’Brien, Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023). ISBN: 9781469675879
October 21
[\a] Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). ISBN: 9780520283824
October 28
[\c] Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). ISBN: 9780226169880
November 4
[\c] Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). ISBN: 9780226383132
November 11
[\c] Anne Kveim Lie, Jeremy A. Greene, and Warwick Anderson, eds., Medicine on a Larger Scale: Global Histories of Social Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025). ISBN: 9781009428552
November 18
[\c] Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
December 2
[\c] Claire L. Wendland, A Heart for the Work: Journeys through an African Medical School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). ISBN: 9780226893273