Disease
| Module title | Disease |
|---|---|
| Module code | HIH3333 |
| Academic year | 2025/6 |
| Credits | 30 |
| Module staff | Professor Kate Fisher (Lecturer) |
| Duration: Term | 1 | 2 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration: Weeks | 10 |
| Number students taking module (anticipated) | 32 |
|---|
Module description
This module explores the concepts of sickness and health. While these might appear to be universal human conditions, this module invites you to think about how the conceptualisation, management, and experience of sickness and health has varied significantly across time and space. From definitions produced by the World Health Organisation for the entire globe to the individual’s subjective experience of bodily, mental, and emotional suffering and wellbeing, what it means to be well and unwell is never detached from historical context. Through case studies drawn from across geographies, chronologies, and scales, you will be encouraged to reflect on how disease categories, treatment regimens, and illness narratives have been historically constructed. This module will also highlight what we can learn about a given political, social, and cultural context by putting sickness and health under the microscope. Both concepts have been central to the definition of the normal and the pathological, whether in relation to disability, sexuality, or race, as well as to the representation of the ‘other’.
Module aims - intentions of the module
This ‘Concepts’ module requires you to engage with historical ideas and theories relating to sickness and health that are applicable across time and space. You will be encouraged to think beyond the detail of your Special Subjects and Dissertations, using a range of illustrative case studies to examine broader ideas. You will have to consider how ideas and concepts about sickness and health vary, develop, or manifest consistently in different time periods and places, and why they are constructed as they are. What can this tell us about past peoples and societies, and what are the implications for the world in which we now live?
All History ‘Concepts’ modules are partly project-based, requiring you to take the initiative. In the first half of term, a team of tutors will introduce themes, concepts, and ideas, setting you up for the rest of the module. The second half of term is student-led: you will work in groups to develop your understanding of sickness and health and lead a seminar to teach fellow students more about these concepts through a series of case-studies.
Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
ILO: Module-specific skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 1. Analyse and explain key developments in the histories of sickness and health across different historical time-periods and geographical regions
- 2. Evaluate carefully and critically the approaches that historians and scholars working in other disciplines have taken to the concept of sickness and health
- 3. Define suitable research topics for independent study/student-led seminars on the history of sickness and health
ILO: Discipline-specific skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 4. Analyse the key developments in complex and unfamiliar political, social, cultural or intellectual environments
- 5. Evaluate different and complex types of historical source and historiography.
- 6. Present work in the format expected of historians, including footnoting and bibliographical references.
- 7. Identify and deploy correct terminology in a comprehensible and sophisticated manner
- 8. Evaluate critically different approaches to history in a contested area
ILO: Personal and key skills
On successfully completing the module you will be able to...
- 9. Work both in a team and independently in order to prepare and lead a seminar
- 10. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment.
Syllabus plan
While content may vary from year to year, it is anticipated that the module may cover some or all of the following:
- Introduction to health and sickness as historical concepts
- Pandemics and epidemic disease
- Reproductive health and rights
- Changing theories and concepts for understanding health and disease
- ‘Alternative’ medicine
- Magic and healing
- The ‘health’ of the population
- Care, work, gender
- International health, development, and citizenship in the twentieth century
- From mental illness to mental health
- Climate, environment, and health
- Health, sickness and disability
- Temporalities of health and illness
- Imperialism, medicine and disease
Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)
| Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities | Guided independent study | Placement / study abroad |
|---|---|---|
| 27 | 273 | 0 |
Details of learning activities and teaching methods
| Category | Hours of study time | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 9 | 9 x 1-hour workshops |
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 2 | 2 x 1-hour lectures |
| Scheduled learning and teaching | 16 | Seminars (tutor-led = 5x2 hours; student-led = 6x1 hour) |
| Guided independent study | 273 | Reading and preparation for seminars, workshops, and assessment |
Formative assessment
| Form of assessment | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seminar plan and schedule of work | 1000 words | 1-9 | Oral |
Summative assessment (% of credit)
| Coursework | Written exams | Practical exams |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 0 | 0 |
Details of summative assessment
| Form of assessment | % of credit | Size of the assessment (eg length / duration) | ILOs assessed | Feedback method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Student-led seminar, including supporting materials | 45 | 1 hour | 1-9 | Written |
| Written assignment | 45 | 3000 words | 1,2,4-8,10 | Written |
| Attendance at student-led seminars and support workshops | 5 | Attendance at student-led seminars and support workshops | 9 | N/A |
| Full completion of ELE log | 5 | Full completion of ELE log | 9 | N/A |
| 0 | ||||
| 0 |
Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)
| Original form of assessment | Form of re-assessment | ILOs re-assessed | Timescale for re-assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student-led seminar, including supporting materials | 5-minute recorded introduction to the topic; 10-minute recording explaining supporting materials and intentions for their use in a seminar; supporting materials | 1-9 | Referral/Deferral Period |
| Written Assignment (3000 words) | Written Assignment (3000 words) | 1,2,4-8,10 | Referral/Deferral Period |
Re-assessment notes
The re-assessment consists of a 3000-word Written Assignment, as in the original assessment, but replaces leading a student-led seminar with recordings and supporting materials that correspond to one student’s contribution to such a seminar. The introduction should outline the student’s understanding of the topic; the longer recording should explain how the seminar would be structured and organised, as well as detailing the material to be used. This will enable the marker to gain a sense of what the student’s understanding of their concept and its specific application in the seminar, what the student intended to do in the seminar, and the rationale for this activity, as well as enabling them to assess the student’s oral seminar-leading skills.
Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.
Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.
Indicative learning resources - Basic reading
- Mark Jackson, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine (2011).
- Mark Jackson, ed., The Routledge History of Disease (2017)
- Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire, 1600-1900 (2014).
- Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, eds The Routledge History of Sex and the Body in the West, 1500 to the Present (2013).
- Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, eds Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013).
- Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine, and Nonhumans in British India, 1820-1909 (2017).
- Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (2014).
- Jennifer Chan, Politics in the Corridor of Dying: AIDS Activism and Global Health Governance (2015).
- Michael Rembis, Catherine J. Kudlick, and Kim Nielsen, eds The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (2018).
- Douglas M. Haynes, Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease (2001)
- Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Phillipines (2006)
- Amy Moran-Thomas, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (2019)
- Charles E Rosenberg and Janet Lynne Golden (eds), Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (1992).
- Claudia Stein, “‘Getting the Pox’: Reflections by an Historian on How to Write the History of Early Modern Disease”, Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, 2, no.1 (2014), pp. 53-60.
| Credit value | 30 |
|---|---|
| Module ECTS | 15 |
| NQF level (module) | 6 |
| Available as distance learning? | Yes |
| Last revision date | 27/08/2024 |
