Health and Healing in America

Thanks for checking in with a first journal entry this week and for going along with my experimental online lecture. I appreciated hearing from each of you and look forward to our first in-person meeting:

Wednesday Jan 29th, UMass Medical School building, room S2-351 from 5-8 pm
*bringing brown-bag dinner is encouraged, there will be a break in the middle

We will discuss Roy Porter’s book Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine, so please bring it to class with you along with notes, questions and ideas for class discussion.

Here are some discussion questions to guide your reading and note-taking:

• Is the body an assemblage of parts or is it a coherent single entity?
• Is disease physiological or ontological (in the parts)?
• What displaced humoral medicine theories (and when, and why)?
• What were the major scientific innovations in diagnosis and origin of disease?
• What was the “microbial revolution” and some of its results?
• In what ways were colonialism/Imperialism and medical development linked?
• Why does Porter say that surgery “for millennia so limited, the craft has become one which knows no frontiers”?
• In what ways do today’s hospitals differ from premodern ones? And are today’s “huge general hospitals” now medicine’s dinosaurs? (or do we even have “huge general hospitals” in the way Porter talks about them now?)
• How have ideas about disease causes (and what constitutes disease itself) changed over time?
• Why does Porter claim that the “golden age” was some generations back?

Bonus link: speaking of plague…