HIST 3510Y – History of Medicine: Global Health and Healthcare from the Bubonic Plague to the AIDS Pandemic.
Syllabus posted July 2010. Subject to minor revisions.
Trent University in Oshawa, Thornton Road Campus
Instructor: Dr. Laurie Jacklin
Class: Monday – 2.10 to 5.00 pm.
Office location: TBA at Thornton Road.
Classroom location: TBA.
Office hours: Monday and Tuesday. Other days by chance, phone, or e-mail. Before September, please contact me at laurie.jacklin@gmail.com
This course explores the history of health, disease, and healing in the Caribbean, India,
Europe, Africa, Latin America, Philippines, and North America. The course begins with the
‘Black Death,’ which killed an estimated 25% to 50% of Europeans by 1350. Although this pandemic challenged the medical belief that diseases were unique to each patient, innovations in preventive medicine and therapeutics languished until the major changes wrought by the revolutionary era and nineteenth-century science. As medical practice transitioned from the bedside to the hospital and then the laboratory, the increasingly scientific investigations revealed how physiological bodily changes, microbes, sanitation, nutrition, poverty, climate, and environment caused ill health, morbidities, and mortality. This knowledge altered traditional ideas about disease prevention, alleviating suffering, and treating sickness, as new institutional structures emerged, while governments enacted expanding suites of legislation to monitor the health of their citizenry. We examine the social history of these broad historical transformations through the experiences of patients, sufferers, practitioners, caregivers, reformers, and policy makers. Our exploration questions the extent to which race, class, and gender influenced the constructions of health, sickness, and disease in the different systems of western, homeopathic, herbal, indigenous, and Indian medical systems throughout this period. By the end of the course, students should be able to define, describe, and analyse key themes and developments in the history of health and healthcare within contemporary ideologies on race, gender, and class.
Required books.
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John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A Brief History with
Documents (NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). Available at the bookstore. ISBN: 0-312-
40087-X
Vincent Tothill, Trinidad’s Doctor’s Office. An Amusing Diary by a Young Scottish
Physician in the 1920s (Trinidad: Paria Publishing, 2009 reprint). Available at the bookstore. ISBN 976-8054-76-0
Other articles and e-books available through the library or the course website.
Course grading and key dates.
15% Assignment #1. The Black Death and its Legacies. Analytical essay of primary sources in
John Aberth, The Black Death. Due: Nov. 1 st , before class. Six pages.*
20% Assignment #2. Medical Autobiography – Doctors and Patients. Analysis of Tothill’s memoir, Trinidad’s Doctor’s Office. Due Feb. 7 th , before class. Eight pages.*
20% Assignment #3. Medicalizing Motherhood and Childbirth. Thematic analytical research essay compared to Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada 1900-1950 (Toronto:
UTP, 2002). E-book at the library. Due March 21 st , before class. Ten pages.*
20% Seminar participation. 10% for Term 1 and 10% for Term II.
25% Final exam during the examination period.
* Essays are double spaced in 12-pitch font, with 1” (2.5 cm) margins, exclusive of title page, bibliography, and footnotes/endnotes. Please conform to the specifications for essays as outlined in Notes on the Preparation of Essays (available from the bookstore).
History 3510Y Syllabus 2010-2011. Page 1 of 5.

Course participation: Each class consists of a lecture and discussion seminar. Read and reflect on the assigned materials (articles, book chapters, and web tours) to prepare for the discussion. The materials are selected to supplement (not supplant) the lectures and stimulate scholarly discussion. The participation grading rubric is posted on the website. In brief, your grade is based on quality, thoughtful contribution, and academic interaction with your peers.
HIST 3510Y and other websites: We use the course website extensively, so check it frequently for resources, assignment details, and announcements. Students submit assignments electronically and graded papers are returned by e-mail. This course requires students to explore archives, government sites, and academic institutions on the web. Please contact the instructor if you have questions about electronic research or submitting your assignments.
Academic Integrity: Academic dishonesty, which includes plagiarism and cheating, is an extremely serious academic offence and carries penalties varying from a zero grade on an assignment to expulsion from the University. Definitions, penalties, and procedures for dealing with plagiarism and cheating are set out in Trent University’s Academic Integrity Policy. You have a responsibility to educate yourself – unfamiliarity with the policy is not an excuse. You are strongly advised to visit Trent’s Academic Integrity website to learn more: www.trentu.ca/academicintegrity
Access to Instruction: It is Trent University’s intent to create an inclusive learning environment. If a student has a disability and/or health consideration and feels that he/she may need accommodations to succeed in this course, the student should contact the Disability
Services Office (BL Suite 109; 748-1281; disabilityservices@trentu.ca
) as soon as possible.
Complete text can be found under Access to Instruction in the Academic Calendar.
Late penalties: Assignments are due electronically on the specified date before the beginning of class. Instructions are posted on the website. Late penalties are 3% per day, including weekend days. Please advise the instructor immediately if a medical crisis prevents you from submitting an assignment and submit the necessary documentation.
Course Outline
September 13 th – Course Introduction and Overview
September 20 th – Disease and Epidemics in History
 In-class discussion: Assignment #1, The Black Death.
Readings: John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A Brief History
with Documents (NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). Read Part I: “Introduction,” “The
Black Death as Historical Event,” “Historical Significance,” and “Studying Medieval
Sources.” This book is required for assignment #1.
Primary Source Exploration: Navigate to the National Library of Medicine and explore the medieval medical treatises by Johannes de Ketham, Fasiculo de Medicina. http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/books.htm
September 27 th – The Bubonic Plague.
Readings: John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350. A Brief History
with Documents (NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). The assigned primary source readings (in Part II of the book) are posted on the course website.
History 3510Y Syllabus 2010-2011. Page 2 of 5.

October 4 th – Medicine at the Bedside, Humoralism, and Anatomy
Readings: Wendy Churchill, “Bodily Differences? Gender, Race, and Class in Hans Sloane’s
Jamaican Medical Practice, 1687-1688,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences, 60, 4 (Oct.2005), pp. 391-444.
Doreen Evenden, “Mothers and their Midwives in Seventeenth-Century London,” in Hilary
Marland, ed. The Art of Midwifery. Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 9-26.
Primary Source Exploration: Navigate to the National Library of Medicine and explore Andreas
Vesalius’s book De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/books.htm
October 11 th – Statutory Holiday. No class.
October 18 th – Enlightenment, Revolutions, and Medicine
Readings: Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British
Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). Chapter 1, “Early
Encounters, c.1600-1750,” pp. 25-57.
Karol Kovalovich Weaver, “The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76, 3 (Fall 2002), pp. 429-60.
Primary Source Exploration: Navigate to the British Library and explore Elizabeth Blackwell’s book on herbalism, catalogued as Classic of Botanical Illustration. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html
October 25 th – Reading week.
November 1 st – Slave Health and Healing
Assignment #1 due before class.
Readings: Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Kingston: Heinemann
Caribbean, 1990). Chapter 7 – “Slave Motherhood: Childbirth and infant death in a cross-cultural perspective,” pp. 120-50. An E-Book in Topcat.
Juanita De Barros, “‘Setting Things Right’: Medicine and Magic in British Guiana, 1803-38,”
Slavery & Abolition, 25, 1 (April 2004), pp. 28-50.
November 8 th – Racializing Medicine: Global Conquests and Charles Darwin
Readings: David Arnold, Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in
Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999). “Introduction,” pp.
1-10. Chapter 1, “Therapeutics and Oriental Bodies,” pp. 11-60.
Primary Source Exploration: Read “Rewriting the Book of Nature. Darwin and the Rise of
Evolutionary Theory” on the National Library of Medicine website. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/darwin/evolutionarytheory.html
November 15 th – Nineteenth-Century Epidemiological Transition
Readings: Christopher Hamlin, “Predisposing Causes and Public Health in Early Nineteenth-
Century Medical Thought,” Social History of Medicine, 5, 1 (April 1992), pp. 43-70.
November 22 nd – Edwin Chadwick, Poverty, and Public Health
Readings: David Arnold, Colonizing the Body, Chapter 4, “Cholera: Disease as Disorder,” pp.
159-99.
Primary Source Exploration: Read the assigned sections of Chadwick’s 1842 report, The Report
on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. The document and assigned readings are posted on the course website.
History 3510Y Syllabus 2010-2011. Page 3 of 5.

November 29 th – Science and Medicine in the Laboratory
Reading: Wendy Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada, 1900-1950 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 2002). Read Chapter 1, “The Uncertain World of Medicine and Medical
Practitioners,” 19-46. Available as an E-Book in Topcat.
December 6 th – Becoming a Doctor: Medical Education and Body-Snatching
Reading: Tothill, Trinidad’s Doctor’s Office, Chapters I to VIII (pp. 1-111). Required reading for assignment #2.
January 10 th – Medical Autobiography
Reading: Tothill, Trinidad’s Doctor’s Office, Chapters IX to XVII (pp. 112-207). Required reading for assignment #2.
January 17 th – Tropical Medicine and the White Man’s Burden
Readings: Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and
Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2006). Chapter 4 –
“Excremental Colonialism”, pp. 104-29. An E-Book in Topcat.
Juanita De Barros, Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in
Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889-1924 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ.
Press, 2003). Chapter 3 – “Cesspool City: Sanitarianism in Colonial Georgetown,” pp.
49-67. An E-Book in Topcat.
Primary Source Exploration: Rudyard Kipling, Take Up The White Man’s Burden.
January 24 th – Legacies of Race, Class, and Gender in Medicine
Readings: Steven Palmer, Chapter 3, “From the Plantation to the Academy. Slavery and the
Production of Cuban Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” in David Wright, Juanita
DeBarros, Steven Palmer, eds., Health and Medicine in the circum-Caribbean 1800-
1968 (NY: Routledge, 2009). Reading available on course website.
Pedro Welch, “Gendered Health Care: Legacies of Slavery in Health Care Provision in Barbados over the period 1870-1920,” Caribbean Quarterly, 49, 4 (June 2003), pp. 104-20.
Reading available on course website.
January 31 st – Medical History and Popular Culture
 In-class film screening and discussion: The Painted Veil.
February 7 th – Racial Degeneration, Eugenics, and Social Darwinism
Assignment #2 due before class.
Readings: Nancy Leys Stepan, “‘Matrimonial Eugenics’: Gender and the Construction of
Negative Eugenics,” in Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics. Race Gender, and Nation in Latin
America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1991), pp. 102-34. Reading available on course website.
Susanne Klausen, “‘For the Sake of the Race’: Eugenic Discourses of Feeblemindedness and
Motherhood in the South African Medical Record, 1903-1926,” Journal of Southern
African Studies, 23, 1 (March 1997), pp. 27-50.
February 14 th – Medicalizing Childbirth and Motherhood
Readings: Mitchinson, Giving Birth in Canada 1900-1950. Chapter 5, “Childbirth”, pp. 158-189.
Chapter 7, “Caesarean Section,” pp. 231-59. An E-Book available through Topcat.
Required reading for assignment #3.
Primary Source Exploration: Research two related primary sources from the archives at http://www.archive.org/ Bring the first page of each source (with the citation) to class.
History 3510Y Syllabus 2010-2011. Page 4 of 5.

February 21 st – Reading week.
February 28 th – Maternal and Child Health.
Readings: Cynthia Comacchio, Nations are Built of Babies. Saving Ontario’s Mothers and
Children, 1900-1940 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1993).
Chapter 2, “‘Guarded Against Harmful Conditions’: The Campaign’s Setting,” pp. 16-42.
An E-Book available through Topcat.
Anne-Emanuelle Birn, “No More Surprising Than a Broken Pitcher? Maternal and Child Health in the Early Years of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau,” in Veronica Strong-Boag and
Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, eds., Children’s Health Issues in Historical Perspective
(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 73-100. An E-Book in Topcat.
March 7 th – The Case of Arctic Populations
 Film screening and discussion: National Film Board Documentary Coppermine
Readings: Pat Grygier, A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the Inuit
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1994). Read Chapter 7, “The Eastern Arctic
Patrol,” 86-103, and Chapter 8, “Life in the San,” 104-16. An E-book in Topcat.
March 14 th – Hospitals: Institutionalizing Social Welfare
Readings: Alison Nuttall, “‘Because of Poverty brought into Hospital: …’ A Casenote-Based
Analysis of the Changing Role of the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Hospital, 1850-1912,”
Social History of Medicine, 20, 2 (Aug. 2007), pp. 263-80.
Alannah Tomkins, “‘The Excellent Example of the Working Class’: Medical Welfare,
Contributory Funding and the North Staffordshire Infirmary from 1815,” Social History
of Medicine, 21, 1 (April 2008), pp. 13-30.
March 21 st – Psychiatric Hospitals in History
Assignment #3 due before class.
Readings: Janet Miron, “'In View of the Knowledge to be Acquired': Public Visits to New York's
Asylums in the Nineteenth Century,” Clio Medica 86, pp. 243-266.
Julie Parle, “The Fools on the Hill: The Natal Government Asylum and the Institutionalisation of Insanity in Colonial Natal,” Journal of Natal & Zulu History, 19 (1999), pp. 1-39.
March 28 th – Canadian First Nations: Residential Schools
Readings: Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British
Columbia 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998). Chapter 5, “Aboriginal Conceptions of the Body, Disease, and Medicine,” 83-99. Reading is on the course website.
Mary-Ellen Kelm, “‘A Scandalous Procession’: Residential Schooling and the Re/Formation of
Aboriginal Bodies, 1900-1950,” Native Studies Review, 11, 2 (1996), pp. 51-88.
April 4 th - Exam Preparation and Review
History 3510Y Syllabus 2010-2011. Page 5 of 5.