3.0

Average Course Rating

This is an interdisciplinary course blending the study of visual and textual narrative, history, ethics, medicine, and war studies. We will explore various genres as we survey how care – medical, psychiatric, and nursing – has changed during wartime over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on the narratives written by and about nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, field medics, orderlies, chaplains, ambulance drivers, and doctors in the conflicts. Though this is a survey, nurses will be our primary focus. We will examine how politics infiltrates the war hospital and affects care; the changing dynamic of women and men in the medical (and battle) field throughout the twentieth century; the innovations that emerged from battle surgery; humanitarian concerns on the front line where friend and foe are blurred; and more. Texts will include but not be limited to film, sitcom, novels, memoirs, letters, diary entries, posters, and poetry. We will use the critical lenses of gender, race, empire, colonialism, and disability to interrogate how medicine and care support – or destabilize! – these concepts in war. Students should expect to write and revise frequently and in a variety of genres throughout the course. All first-year students who have taken Reintro and all students at the sophomore level or above are welcome.