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Health and its Politics in the 20th Century

Module description

Who has a right to health, and who is responsible for maintaining it? Who should pay for it and who should provide it? Questions around access to health and medical management have been central to how international order, state formations and political systems have been imagined and organised in the 20^th century. We will explore relationships among social and political structures and health in local, national and global contexts, moving in space, time and thematic approach throughout the course. We will focus on intersections of medical technologies and scientific knowledge; social movements and political ideologies, such as empires and the bacteriological revolution; reproductive rights and women’s health movements; socialist ideas of health and decolonisation; and the rise of global health and the neoliberal world order. 

Module aims - intentions of the module

The module aims to:

• Introduce you to the entangled histories of health, society and politics in the 20^th century through analyses on local, national and global registers.
• Drawing on published and translated source collections as well as a growing number of online digital archives,

the module will make use of sources ranging from governmental records, medical literature, news media, oral history interviews, public health campaign materials, advertisements, personal letters, photographs, conference proceedings, memoirs.

Through working with the extensive primary source collections available to this module, you will develop a range of research, analytical, interpretative and communication skills that can be applied in further academic studies or in graduate careers

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate knowledge of the different sources available for the study of 20th century history of medicine and public health from a comparative and transnational perspective, together with a very close specialist knowledge of sources in seminar presentations and written work
• 2. Demonstrate the ability to analyse the complex diversity of the sources studied

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Ability to understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible manner
• 4. Ability to follow the changing course of medical knowledge, practice and public health issues across the period

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. Independent and autonomous study and group work, including presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning
• 6. Ability to digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument.
• 7. Ability to present complex arguments orally

Syllabus plan

While the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• The politics of prevention
• Colonial health management
• Health internationalists
• Socialist medicine
• The medical marketplace
• Welfare states and health
• Race and the politics of healthcare
• Health disasters and the regulation of medical interventions
• Reproductive health
• War and health
• The rise of global health and the neoliberal world order
• Disease outbreaks and pandemics

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

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

• Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (originally pub. 1935) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
• Georges Canguilhem,The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone Books, 1989
• John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner, eds., Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004
• Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden eds., Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, New Brusnswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992
• Cooter, Roger and Stein, Claudia, Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE:
• Institutional Repository for Information Sharing (IRIS) World Health Organization https://apps.who.int/iris/
• Collections of the Wellcome Library https://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/
• U.S. National Library of Medicine https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/
• Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library (Yale University) Digitized collections https://library.medicine.yale.edu/digital
• Oral histories of medicine and health professionals at the British Library https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/oral-histories-of-medicine-and-health-professionals

Key words search

Medicine, Health, Global Health, technology, politics, internationalism, science, state, 20^th century, Cold War, international organizations, decolonization