Beth Linker

Before the discovery of anesthesia in the nineteenth century, surgery was often a grizzly and horrific affair, inevitably involving extreme pain. Surgeons had a reputation as dirty, blood-thirsty “barbarians,” and patients rarely sought out their services. But all of this changed during the twentieth century. Today surgery is one of the most prestigious medical specialties, and patients—especially those who long to look younger, thinner, and trimmer—voluntarily submit to multiple procedures. This course will investigate the cultural and scientific sources of these dramatic changes, with readings ranging from graphic descriptions of “bonesetting” and suturing during the middle Ages to contemporary accounts of childbirth and plastic surgery in antiseptic hospitals and clinics.

This course is an introduction to the historical development of medical ethics and to the birth of bioethics in the twentieth-century United States. We will examine how and why medical ethical issues arose in American society at this time. Themes will include human experimentation, organ donation, the rise of medical technology, and euthanasia. Finally, this course will examine the contention that the current discipline of bioethics is a purely American phenomenon that has been exported to Great Britain, Canada, and Continental Europe.

Course Objectives:
• To understand how and why the field of bioethics began in the United States during the 1970s.
• To appreciate the complex interactions between patients, medical professionals, and the law.
• To gain an appreciation of the role of American exceptionalism in medical professionalism, practice, and ethics.
• To understand the role that race, gender, and class play in the construction of ethical problems in medicine.

This seminar explores the history of disability as a lived-experience, a basis for nineteenth-century “freak shows,” a medical diagnosis, a common outcome of America’s wars, and as a personal identifier that has sparked political controversy and activism throughout the last two hundred years. Some of the topics in this course will include the history of the “normal” body, plastic surgery, prosthetic design and engineering, the development of the Veteran’s hospital system, as well as the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

This lecture course introduces students to a broad range of topics that fall under the heading of American health policy. It covers the history of health care in America from the U.S. Civil War to the present day. The goal of the course will be to answer the following questions:
• What is the difference between socialized and private-market medicine?
• Why is the United States one of the only industrialized nations to have a private, non-nationalized, non-federalized health care system?
• Why is U.S. health insurance a benefit given through places of employment, rather than a universal birth-right available to every citizen?

Many books written today on the history and sociology of twentieth-century medicine invoke the term “medicalization.” We are told that everything from childbirth and allergies to hyperactivity and hospitals have become dominated by the medical profession and its explanation of health and illness. This course traces the history of the medicalization thesis, from its beginnings with Michel Foucault and Ivan Illich to its latest articulation put forth by sociologist Peter Conrad. Once we are accustomed to the multiple meanings of medicalization, we will put them each under scrutiny, borrowing from literature in the history of religion (a subfield that has grappled with the predominance of the secularization thesis, a theory very much akin to medicalization), as well as from the history of the body. In short, the goal of this course is to read current works in the history of medicine in order to problematize the theory of medicalization.

Course Objectives:
• To understand the multiple meanings of medicalization.
• To trace the historical beginnings of the medicalization thesis.
• To appreciate the shared assumptions between medicalization and secularization, and how these assumptions shape the writing of history of medicine today.