RACE, AMERICAN MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

HISTSCI/MEDHIST 509

Health problems in the U.S. from the colonial period to the twentieth century; efforts made toward their solutions.

HISTSCI 360

Analyze historical factors impacting healthcare cost, access, and services with focus on social determinants of health in the United States across the long 20th century. Evaluate current state of the field through literature reviews and conversations with guest lecturers. Apply historical analysis in consideration of current disparities in health resources. Produce original research project and policy proposal at intersection of public health, medical history, and health law and policy.

GEN&WS 524

Uses race and gender theoretical frameworks to understand peoples' experiences with health and medicine. Conceptualizes race and gender as social categories and applies these frameworks to how people experience health, wellness, and disease. Examines how healthcare and medicine are structured according to racialized and gendered frameworks. Surveys a wide range of issues including reproductive health, body size, mental health, COVID, among other topics. Uses an intersectional approach to analyzing key debates in scholarship on health and medicine.

MEDHIST 746

Examine ideas about race and ethnicity and their relationship to the history of "Western" medicine and science. Analyze the role of social, economic, cultural, and political developments in the shaping of scientific and medical notions of race and bodily difference. Study how skin color (and other elements of "racial identity") has influenced the experiences of patients and populations, physicians and nurses, and medical researchers. Discuss how conceptions of race have shaped both the health concerns and health outcomes of Americans in the past three hundred years, and the structure of medical institutions in the United States. Topics include the origins of racial classification, race and colonialism, the health and medical care of the enslaved, the use of enslaved people as research subjects, the history of racial disparities in medicine, structural racism of the medical establishment, race and reproduction, and the struggle for justice in health care during the past few decades.

AFROAMER/HISTSCI 275

Surveys the medical and scientific constructions of categories of race, placing the development of racial theories in a broad social and political context. Pays particular attention to the importance of racial science in slavery and colonialism.