3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

In this research seminar, we will examine the history of medicine and healing through the lens of mobilities. We will examine how healers and patients have delivered or sought care in new places or in transit and how the study of medicine in motion provides new perspectives on questions of place and space, legitimacy, power, and translation in the history of medicine and medical science. The course promotes awareness of the extent to which healing practices shape our perceptions and lived experiences of the world and how medical mobility (or lack thereof) has contributed to ideas about racial, ethnic, and class-based differences. We will consider episodes from the history of military medicine, sea voyages, voluntary and forced migrations, quests for therapy, missionary medicine, ambulance services, and other forms of medicine in transit. In examining these situations, we will explore the ways that uneven distribution of knowledge, resources, and mobility shape the power dynamics of healing encounters and have produced and suppressed forms of knowing about medicine and its history.