Week 1. August 22. Introduction: Ways of thinking about disease and society.

Week. 2. August 29. No class this week.

Activity: Media watch. You will report on September 12 on one newspaper article, magazine article, radio or TV news story, movie, or TV show dealing with disease. (Bring the article, a radio or TV transcript if available, or your own brief written summary of your story, as well as an outline of your remarks to hand in.) What is the relationship between disease and society in your piece? Which of the models from the introductory lecture best fits your piece? What assumptions about disease and health lie behind it?

September 5. Holiday: Labor Day.

Week 3. September 12. Disease as an agent of historical change.

Reading: Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 122-35, 152-83, 195-206.

Lecture: A history of histories of disease.

Week 4. September 19. The "social construction" of disease.

Reading: Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York, 1997), pp. 115-32;

Burkhard Bilger, “Letter from Kentucky: Squirrel and Man,” The New Yorker (July 17, 2000): 58-67.

Lecture: Disease and "Others."

 

Week 5. September 26. Different cultures, different understandings of disease.

Reading: Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: The Noonday Press, 1997), pp. vii-ix, 1-11, 20-23, 38-49, 140-53, 171-80, 250-61 (optional: 278-88).

Lecture: Disease and medicine in the ancient world.

Week 6. October 3. The Hippocratic understanding of disease.

Reading: Hippocrates, Epidemics, book 1: 1-3, in J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, trans., Hippocratic Writings, pp. 87-89; The Sacred Disease, ibid., pp. 237-51; Hippocratic Oath;

“Cures of Apollo and Asclepius,” in Georg Luck, ed. and trans., Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 142-45.

Lecture: The medieval view of disease.

 

Week 7. October 10. Leprosy in the medieval world.

Reading: R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), pp. 45-65, 73-80.

Ritual of Separation of a Leper, from the Old Sarum Rite.

Michael Dols, “The Leper in Medieval Islamic Society,” Speculum 58 (1983): 891-916 (selections).

Lecture: The experience of plague.

Week 8. October 17. Plague in early modern Europe.

Reading: Brian Pullan, "Plague and Perceptions of the Poor in Early Modern Italy," in Terrence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), pp. 101-123.

Miquel Parets, A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets, 1651, ed. James Amelang (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 37-41, 59-71.

Lecture: The emergence of the "French pox."

Week 9. October 24. Syphilis in early modern Europe.

Reading: Anna Foa, "The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494-1530)," trans. Carole C. Gallucci, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective. Selections from Quaderni Storici (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 26-45.

(optional extra reading: Winfried Schleiner, "Infection and Cure through Women: Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 499-517.)

Lecture: Disease, medicine, and society in early modern Europe.

Week 10. October 31. Changing attitudes towards consumption.

Reading: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York, 1977, 1978), pp. 3-42.

(optional: Thomas Mann, "Tristan.")

Lecture: The cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century.

Week 11. November 7. Cholera.

Reading: Richard J. Evans, "Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Terrence Ranger and Paul Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas, as above, pp. 149-73.

(optional: Edgar Allen Poe, “The Mask of the Red Death”)

Lecture: The progressive era and the science of eugenics

Week 12. November 14. “Degeneracy,” “defectives,” euthanasia, and eugenics.

Reading: Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York and Oxford, 1996), pp. 1-18, 81-99.

Lecture: Feminism, the “new woman,” and gender anxiety in the late 19th century.

Week 13. November 21. Hysteria and its treatments.

Reading: Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), ch. 1, pp. 1-20 (optional pp. 67-110);

Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York, 1997), pp. 30-48.

Lecture: The emergence of AIDS.

Week 14. November 28. Venereal diseases in modern America.

Reading: Allan M. Brandt, "The Syphilis Epidemic and Its Relation to AIDS," Science 239 (1988): 375-80;

Upton Sinclair and Eugene Brieux, Damaged Goods (1913 novelization), pp. 10-19, 26-29, 40-41 (entire text on-line at: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=1157);

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One: Millennium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), pp. 9-10, 17-22, 27-28, 48-54, 65-68, 102-06, 121-25.

Max Brantley, “Dumb and Dumber,” Arkansas Times (July 14, 2005): 16.

Lecture: The coming plague?

 

Week 15. December 5. Emerging threats.

Reading: Laurie Garrett, “The Next Pandemic?” Foreign Affairs 84 (July/August 2005): 3ff (printout from Academic Search Premier).

“International groups fly to Angola to try and stop the spread of Marburg fever,” Morning Edition (NPR transcript), April 13, 2005.

Sharon LaFraniere and Deniise Grady, “Stalking a Deadly Virus, Battling a Town’s Fears,” New York Times, April 17, 2005.

“Health professionals in Kano, Nigeria, still have reservations about the Western-led polio immunization campaign,” Morning Edition (NPR transcript), April 13, 2005.

Course requirements for UAMS seniors:

• Attendance at all weekly discussions.
• Completion of all reading assignments.
• Thirteen 1 to 2-page reading responses, to be handed in each Monday for weeks three through fifteen. I will grade these responses on a 10-point scale. I am looking for: 1) a brief summary of the reading(s); 2) some critique of the reading, a comparison with another reading or a current situation, and/or some question(s) for discussion that arises from the reading (e.g., “I think Reef overstates the case for disease’s role in history because . . . .” or “The experiences of leprosy and plague seem very similar in that . . . .” or “Do you think leprosaria would work for AIDS patients?”); and 3) specific quotations or examples from the readings.

 

Additional requirements for UALR students (3 credit hours):

• UALR students receiving 3 hours of credit, in addition to the above, will research a topic in the history of disease chosen in consultation with the instructor, culminating in a paper (8-10 pages for undergraduates; 10-15 pages for graduate students). We will have weekly progress reports on the research projects on Mondays at 8-8:40 p.m., after the week's discussion and lecture. (I will hand out a schedule of due dates for various milestones in the research project; successfully completing each of these milestones on schedule will count for your final grade.) You may work on any topic you choose, provided it somehow deals with the relationship between disease and society. You might, for example, read medical journals or women's magazines from the turn of the century to see how they describe syphilis or tuberculosis, or you might read a work of literature dealing with disease, such as Ibsen's Enemy of the People to study how his society viewed disease. Or you might read an old history book dealing with disease, such as Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History, to see how past authors have envisioned the relation between disease and society.

 

Grading:

--Grades for UAMS students will be computed as follows:

Reading responses 60%

Class participation 40%

--Grades for UALR undergraduates and graduate students receiving 3 hours of credit will be computed as follows:

Reading responses 30%

Final paper 40%

Meeting intermediate deadlines for the research project 10%

Class participation 20%

Grades are computed on the following scale:

A=90-100%-----B=80-89%-----C=70-79%------D=60-69%------F=0-59%

In case of some mix-up, it is a good idea to save all returned work until you receive your grade at the end of the semester.

Disability Support Services:

It is the policy of UALR to accommodate students with disabilities, pursuant to federal law and state law. Any student with a disability who needs accommodation, for example in arrangements for seating, examinations, note-taking should inform the instructor at the beginning of the course. It is also the policy and practice of UALR to make web-based information accessible to students with disabilities. If you, as a student with a disability, have difficulty accessing any part of the online course materials for this class, please notify the instructor immediately. The chair of the department offering this course is also available to assist with accommodations. Students with disabilities are encouraged to contact Disability Support Services, telephone 501-569-3143 (v/tty), and on the Web at http://www.ualr.edu/dssdept/.

History Department assessment policy:

The policy of the History Department is to engage students in the process of assessing courses in the department's curriculum. Department faculty and the UALR administration use assessment data to monitor how well students are learning both historical content and the skills of essay writing. At several points during the semester you may be asked to participate in this process by writing a brief essay in class or your instructor might submit one or more of your examinations for review by other members of the department. All assessment activities are conducted on an anonymous basis and any evaluations will be kept in strict confidence. When you are asked to participate in this process please do your best. Direct any questions regarding assessment to your instructor or the department chairperson.

Classroom etiquitte:

Please turn off cell phones and beepers before entering the classroom or set them to a silent alert. In the rare event you must enter late or leave class early, please let me know in advance.
Cheating and plagiarism: Cheating and plagiarism are serious offenses and will be treated as such. ("Plagiarism" means "to adopt and reproduce as one's own, to appropriate to one's use, and incorporate in one's own work without acknowledgment the ideas of others or passages from their writings and works." See Section VI, Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities and Behavior, Student Handbook, p. 39. Copying directly from the textbook or an encyclopedia article without quotation marks or an identifying citation, for example, constitutes plagiarism.) Anyone who engages in such activities will receive no credit for that assignment and may in addition be turned over to the Academic Integrity and Grievance Committee for University disciplinary action, which may include separation from the University.

Copyright notice:

Copyright © by Laura Smoller as to this syllabus and all lectures. Students and auditors are prohibited from selling notes during this course to (or being paid for taking notes by) any person or commercial firm without the express written permission of the professor teaching this course.