STS.330J History and Anthropology of Medicine and Biology (MIT)
STS.330J History and Anthropology of Medicine and Biology (MIT) course explores recent historical and anthropological approaches to the study of life, in both medicine and biology. After grounding our conversation in accounts of natural history and medicine that predate the rise of biology as a discipline, we explore modes of theorizing historical and contemporary bioscience. Drawing on the work of historian William Coleman, we examine the forms, functions, and transformations of biological and medical objects of study. Along the way we treat the history of heredity, molecular biology, race, medicine in the colonies and the metropole, and bioeconomic exchange. We read anthropological literature on old and new forms of biopower, at scales from the molecular to the organismic to the global. The course includes readings from the HASTS Common Exam List. The aim of this seminar is to train students to be participants in scholarly debates in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences about the nature of life, the body, and biomedicine.
- Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Language: English
- Author: Jones, David
- Lisence Terms: Content within individual OCW courses is (c) by the individual authors unless otherwise noted. MIT OpenCourseWare materials are licensed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). For further information see http://ocw.mit.edu/terms/index.htm
- Tags: historical medicine, medieval dissection, gender, visible human project, genealogies, genome, biological kinship, biology of race, race and disease, emerging diseases, human relationship with animals, reproductive technologies, therapeutics, bioprospecting, climate change, environmental technology,
- Course Publishing Date: Dec 10, 2009
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