Welcome to History 270: Race, Medicine, and Society!

This is a course taught by David Kieran at Washington & Jefferson College in the Spring of 2018. The course description is below, but we'll be using this space to post responses to our readings and class discussions, as well as links to interesting materials related to the course topics. Please check back frequently for updates.

What does it mean to think about health & illness, as social constructions, rather than biological realities? What are the cultural factors that shape who is considered sick and well, who deserves care and who does not, and what medical procedures are appropriate and ethical? In this course, we will explore these questions by asking how ideas about racial identity and citizenship have intersected with, shaped, and been shaped by ideas about health, illness, public health, and the practice of medicine. We will examine the intersecting histories of the social construction of racial identity; racism and anti-racism; the quest for civil and human rights; and medicine and public health. In particular, we will explore the following questions:

• How have medical discourses of illness and health been used to define racialized populations -- African-Americans, Latinx, Asian -- as deserving or not deserving rights, privileges, services, and protections in U.S. culture? 
• In what ways have ideas about race shaped debates about medical treatments, access to healthcare, and the approach to public health challenges in U.S. culture?
• How have racialized people and bodies been imagined as deserving or not deserving of healthcare or as appropriate sites for medical study and experimentation? What have been the consequences of these imaginings?
• How have particular health issues and diseases been imagined in relation to specific racial groups, and how have those narratives shaped ideas about personal and social responsibility, access to care, appropriate treatments, and so on?
• How has access to healthcare emerged as a civil rights issue in various moments, and how have activists struggled to secure healthcare for particular populations?  
• How have the debates around all of these questions intersected with the larger social, cultural, and political movements of 19th and 20th century America, including slavery and emancipation, U.S. imperialism, immigration and nativism, the Civil Rights movement, and the rise of neoliberalism?

In short, we will place the intersecting histories of race and medicine at the center of U.S. culture from the Civil War to the present, and ask what looking through that lens reveals about how Americans imagine who is part of the nation and who is not, and what the privileges or consequences of being in one category or another are.