Using primary sources students will explore the impact, management and changing definitions of disease in various pre-modern societies. We look at disease in the context of encounters, environmental change and state formation between 100 and 1700CE. Not just understood as a biological phenomenon, disease can also work as signifying system, creating status hierarchies and highlighting particular social and political anxieties. Through the study of five or six historical epidemics, students will learn how to create historical resources out of medical sources.
History