Browse Hierarchy GEG6145: Historical Geographies of Medicine: From Imperial Hygiene to Global Health

This module explores the relationship between medicine and projects of European imperial expansion. Focusing on the period 1750 to the present, the module examines how European encounters with unfamiliar bodies, places, and diseases led to changes in the practice of medicine as public health increasingly became a 'tool of empire'. Informed by scholarship from medical and environmental history, students learn how a geographical perspective can be used to interrogate the histories and contemporary legacies of these encounters with difference. Key topics that will be considered include: disease and environment; the emergence of racial medicine; sexuality and gender; and the colonial legacies of contemporary global health.