CSP 70 Global Medical Cultures

How did healing knowledge moving between cultures lead to the rising authority and power of medicine in global history? This course takes a global approach to the history of medicine and biomedical science to offer a new narrative of the emergence of modern medicine. Familiar stories of medicine often focus on the progress of European physicians and the diffusion of knowledge from the "West" across the globe in the early modern period. By contrast, this course seeks to understand how medical knowledge has always involved cross-cultural exchanges, networks, and translation. Medicine is frequently the result of trade and travel, empire-building and colonialism, slavery and migration. Our course begins in the Islamic world, and will turn to how physicians in the Abbasid Caliphate engaged tibb yunani, or Hellenistic medicine, and Ayurvedic traditions from South Asia through institutions like the Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom in Baghdad. From here we will begin our world tour of medical cultures. Topics for the course include the social and cultural roles of Maya ah-men and Nahua ticitl in Central America, the production of encyclopedias and pharmacological compendia in Ming and Qing-dynasty China, the interaction of Rangaku and Shingaku in Tokugawa Japan, European physicians and colonialism in the Americas, diasporic Atlantic African odunsinni and nganga mbuki in Brazil, and Ayurveda in Mughal India. We will question how no single path to "medical modernity" existed, but rather how medicine and medical authority emerged out of complex interactions between very diverse cultures. Writing assignments throughout the course will enable participants to develop skill in expository writing, research with primary and secondary sources, and historical analysis.