Courses:

When you click the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book (or other media) from Amazon.com, MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of this purchase and any other purchases you make during that visit. This will not increase the cost of your purchase. Links provided are to the US Amazon site, but you can also support OCW through Amazon sites in other regions. Learn more.

This course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of medicine and biology. Topics include histories of bodies and embodiment in medicine; institutional and social genealogies and futures for genes and genomes; the role of science and medicine in racial formation; epidemics and emergent diseases; new reproductive technologies and socialities; the laboratory and field lives of animals, plants, microbes, molecules, and environments.

This is a seminar. Students are required to give at least one seminar presentation, offering a critical evaluation of positions represented in the readings for their chosen day. There are two writing assignments: a short paper (5 pages) on course readings up through week 6, and a 15-20 page paper that can be either (A) a research paper using course materials to discuss a case study of interest to you, or (B) a more extended argumentative literature review. A prospectus for this paper will be due in week 9 and the final paper will be due in week 14, in time for our class conference.

The readings are a mix of books and articles or chapters. We recommend purchasing:

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999. ISBN: 9780942299892.

Lock, Margaret. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780520226050.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780674008250.

Jones, David S. Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780674013056.

Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race in America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780807825846.

Hacking, Ian. Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780813918235.

Rader, Karen. Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780691016368.

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780393038729.

Thompson, Charis. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780262201568.

Pressman, Jack C. Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780521353717.

Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780674014879.