Health and Healing in America

Our next three class sessions all bring us up through the 19th century to the early 20th century in medical / health practices, professionalization, and technological and scientific progress. Continue reading →

Update: Class is cancelled on Monday, Feb 13 due to snow. This week’s readings will BOTH be discussed in Wednesday’s class (Foucault, “Birth of the Clinic” and Burnham, Ch 3). Reminder: Diagnosis: History paper is due on Wednesday, Feb 15. Continue reading →

UPDATE: NO Class Today, Wed 2/8 – Dr. Hangen is sick

This week we look at another late 18th/early 19th century context of frontier medicine, medical care in the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803-1806). Continue reading →

Reading: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “1787: Exceeding Dangerously Ill” from A Midwife’s Tale (1991) – it’s posted as a PDF on Blackboard under “Readings”

Links for Today:
DoHistory.org
Guidelines and search term suggestions for the Diagosis: History project (due Wed Feb 15)

Bring laptops on Wednesday 2/1 to work with the Ballard diary

For Monday, Feb 6 – Reading is Volney Steele, “Lewis and Clark: Keelboat Physicians” posted as a PDF on Blackboard under “Readings.”

Reading for Today: Burnham, Health Care in America, Ch 1-2

Links for Today, re: Smallpox Inoculation in Boston
Dramatization of a Smallpox Inoculation / HBO’s John Adams (2008)
Interview with Stephen Coss, author of The Fever of 1821
The Fight Over Inoculation During the 1721 Boston Smallpox Epidemic (Harvard Science in the News)
The Boston Smallpox Epidemic (Contagion: Harvard Open Collections) – with original sources

For Monday:
Read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “1787: Exceeding Dangerously Ill” from A Midwife’s Tale (1991) – it’s posted as a PDF on Blackboard under “Readings”

Please bring laptops to class on Monday, as we’ll be exploring a digital version of the diary Ulrich used to write this essay.

Response #1 is due on Wednesday, 1/25. Please use the readings so far and choose something to comment on, discuss, or analyze [Flexner Report, Porter Chapters 1-3, Hippocratic oath, Burnham’s Chapters 1-2]. Write a 400+ word reading response and post it to the Blackboard Response Journal by 12:00 noon on Wednesday. (Pro tip: compose and proofread your response offline and then cut/paste into Blackboard, to avoid losing work).

Links for Today:
Drug resistant diseases (CDC)
Black Death – Bubonic Plague clip (History Channel)

Reading for Wednesday:
Burnham, Health Care in America, Chapters 1-2

This website serves as the hub for Tona Hangen’s history course, “Health and Healing in America,” for the Spring 2017 semester at Worcester State University. This course meets Mon/Wed at 12:30 in Sullivan 320.

The textbooks for this course are listed under the “Readings” tab above.

From this website, you can download the syllabus or access it online, stay up to date with course news and any changes, see the guidelines for the course papers and projects, and follow links to recommended history and writing resources.

This site is a blog, meaning it updates frequently and therefore you should either bookmark it or subscribe to it using an RSS feed reader (such as Feedly) to stay up to date with all the course news and updates. I leave up the previous semesters’ information as an archive for my past students. You can safely ignore any post tagged “Spr14” or earlier.

If you have questions about the course before we meet in person on January 18th, please feel free to email me, at thangen (at) worcester.edu