Medicine, Identity, and Technology
in Modern History
MODULE HANDBOOK 2008/9
Contents
Course Details
Statement of Aims and Learning Outcomes
Teaching Methods, Workload, and Assessment
Outline of Teaching/Discussion Questions
Texts, Readings, and Media Sources
Guide to Seminars and Readings
Media Journal Guidelines
Course Details:
Lectures: Tuesdays, 4-5, Room S2.81
Seminars: Tuesdays, 5-6, Room S0.13
Email: /
This year, we will explore the impact of often-controversial medical, scientific and technological innovations on individual, familial/community and national identities: in other words, their impact on how we know who we are – and how we identify others. We will look at a range of case studies including:
· Reproductive technologies (from adoption to the Pill to IVF and its successors);
· Diagnostic technologies from the ultrasound to genetic screening;
· Imperial medicine;
· Biotechnologies of identification (from fingerprint databases to genomics)
· Organ and tissue transplantation;
· ‘Big medicine’, in the form of the Human Genome and Human Genetic Diversity Projects.
Using the evidence offered by these examples, we will ask if any or all of them have changed the ways in which people think of themselves, their families, and the cultures and nations in which they live. By the end of the year, students will be able to describe and assess the roles of medicine and technologies in transforming notions of identity at the individual, familial and national levels, from the 19th century to the present.
‘Medicine, Identity, and Technology in Modern History’ is designed to complement the first-year History core course (‘The Making of the Modern World, 1750-2000'), as well as adding to existing History option courses, by introducing you to the histories of technology and medicine, and to science and technology studies. It will acquaint you with historical, anthropological, sociological, and ethical approaches to medicine and technology (particularly in the 20th century), and add interdisciplinary skills to your repertoire for research, thinking, and writing across all modules that may be taken by them.
Statement of Aims and Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module the student should be able to:
· Describe the history of
reproductive technologies;
biomedical technologies of identification;
imperial and international interactions between medicine and identity;
organ and tissue transplantation;
‘big medicine’ initiatives including the Human Genome Project and Human Genetic Diversity Project.
· Describe the relationship between such technologies and changes in understandings of ‘identity’ at the individual, familial and national levels, and over time.
· Use a variety of scholarly approaches to assess medicine, science and technology.
· Engage with and analyse media representations of medicine, science, and technology.
· Reflect on themselves as patients and consumers of medical ideas and technologies, produced in and shaped by particular social and educational circumstances, and to discuss their counterparts in the past in similar terms.
Teaching Methods, Workload, and Assessment
This module is taught by weekly lectures and seminars (1x1 hours each), and by individual tutorials to discuss essays and offer feedback.
Assessment:
· First year (and Part-time Level One) students are assessed on the basis of two short (2000 words, excluding notes and bibliography) essays (50% of final mark) and one long (4500, excluding notes and bibliography) word essay (50% of final mark).
· Second year (and Part-time Honours-level) students may choose between a 3-hour, three question exam paper OR a 2-hour, two question paper, plus a 4500 word (excluding notes and bibliography) essay.
· All students will also keep a media journal, from which they will present at least one entry over the course of the module. Journal and presentation are non-assessed, but must be submitted to qualify for completion. See ‘Media Journal Guidelines’, p. 25-6.
Students may choose their own essay topics, subject to my approval, which must be obtained in advance. Alternatively, students may wish to choose from the topics below.
*****Note that significant overlaps in content between different pieces of assessed work (e.g. essay topics, exam answers, or overlaps between assessed essay topics and exam answers) will be penalized.*****
4,500 word essays:
· Compare and contrast the role and use of genetics in surveillance and either medical screening, or reproductive technologies. What is the impact of genetics on identity in each of these fields, and how has the rise of genetic science and genetic technologies changed each of them?
· Analyze the relationship and interactions between medicine, technology and national identity. You should compare the human genome project with at least one other technology/medical intervention. Include assessments of historical context in your argument.
· Explore the impact of national history on responses to new biomedical and/or surveillance technologies, comparing at least two different technologies or nations.
· Compare the impact of older and newer responses to reproduction (say adoption and abortion vs the NRTs and screening technologies) on historical and contemporary understandings of ‘motherhood’, ‘fatherhood’ and ‘the family’.
· What factors have contributed to the increasing popularity of biogenetic understandings of identity and family? Answer this question by comparing specific examples from the past and present.
2000 word essays:
· ‘Technologies of identification created different kinds of identity in colonised and colonising nations’. Discuss.
· The new reproductive technologies have changed the meaning of ‘motherhood’. Discuss.
· Historically, medicine has played a crucial role in building national identities. Discuss.
· Who has benefited most from the new medical technologies of visualization?
· ‘Genetics and genomics offer useful historical information’. Discuss.
· Compare and contrast the impacts of ‘scientific motherhood’ and ‘the patient role’ on women.
· ‘If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear from DNA databases’. Discuss.
· Adoption is a reproductive technology. Argue for or against.
Essay due dates:
Short Essay 1: Due no later than 4PM Monday, Week 9, Term 1
Short essay 2: Due no later than 4PM Monday, Week 9, Term 2
Long essay: See departmental guidelines for due date.
Marking scale: For general information on marking scales at the University of Warwick, see p.27.
In this module, I will follow the standard departmental marking criteria.
Outline of Teaching/Discussion Questions
Week / Lecture / Seminar
1 / Introduction: ‘Who do you think you are?’ / No Seminar
Theme One: Medicine, science, and the family
2 / Making Motherhood / No Seminar
3 / Reproduction and revolution: money, medicine, and the Pill / What is a reproductive technology, and why are they so controversial?
4 / Who’s the daddy? Genetics and parental identity / Blood, genes and the modern ‘family’
5 / Inheriting Illness part 1: genes, families, and cultural identities / Risk, blame and (social) responsibility: the new Eugenics?
6 /
Reading Week
Theme 2 Medical visions and the individual7 / What the eye doesn’t see: ultrasound and the ‘unborn’ / The politics of ‘personhood’ and ‘parenthood’
8 / Visualization and professionalization: focusing on the fetus / Authority, images and infants
9 / Inheriting Illness part 2: genes, families, and the patient role / Diagnosis, prognosis, and risk in the genetic age: censoring the body?
10 / The international perspective / No Seminar
Term 2
Medicine and identity from imperialism to the cold war
Week / Lecture / Seminar
Theme 3 Global medicine and national identities: Subjects, citizens, and ‘civilization’
1 / Imperial medicine and the ‘civilising mission’ / No Seminar
2 / Trade, disease, and international health / ‘Weak States’, SARS and health for all
3 / Doctoring National Identity / What role did medicine play in the creation/demise of ‘White Australia’?
Theme 4 Identity and identification: linking the self to the skin
4 / Identifying the ‘Other’: imperial fingerprints / The power is in the details
5 / Myths and measurements: anthropometry / No Seminar
6 / Reading Week
7 / Identity, privacy and technology: DNA fingerprints and CCTV / Security, suspicion, and the consumption of identification
Theme 5 Bodies and the body politic: life, death and organ transplantation
8 / Tissues and treatments: organ transplantation in post-war Germany / ‘Medicine gone mad’: Nazis, Nuremburg, and national identity
9 / Organs and ownership / Do we own ourselves?
10 / Brain-dead: medical morality in the non-western world / Culture and the social self
Term 3
Medicine and Technology in the ‘New World Order’
Week / Lecture / Seminar
1 / ‘Sicko’
Theme 6 Genomics, communities and national identities
2 / Big medicine? History and the Human Genome Project / Is genetics the new history?
3 / Contentious communities: the Human Genetic Diversity Project / Re-coding or de-coding history?
4 / Conclusions / No Seminar (optional revision session)
Texts, Readings, and Media Sources
· Most readings will be drawn from journals, and will be available as electronic resources from JSTOR and PROJECT MUSE. If you are not familiar with these resources, see me SOON!
· The books below are required either in their entirety or in part. We will read larger sections of books marked with a *. These will be held at SHORT LOAN, and, where possible, a few copies will be available for purchase at the University Bookstore.
*Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
Bridie Andrews and Andrew Cunningham, Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1997).
*Alison Bashford, ed., Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).
*Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprints and Criminal Identification (Cambridge MA: Harvard, 2001).
*Donna Dickenson, Body Shopping: The Economy Fuelled by Flesh and Blood (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008).
Jose van Dijck, Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics, (Macmillan Press, 1998)
*Kaja Finkler, Experiencing the New Genetics: Family and kinship on the medical frontier. (Philadelphia: UPenn, 2000).
*Linda Hogle Recovering the Nation’s Body: Cultural Memory Medicine and the Politics of Redemption (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1999).
*Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity with a new preface by the author (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Dan Kevles and Leroy Hood (eds) The Code of Codes: Scientific and social issues in the Human Genome Project (Cambridge MA: Harvard, 1992).
Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1996).
*Lara Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
*Dorothy Nelkin, M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: W.H.Freeman and Co, 1995).
Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Michelle Stanworth, Reproductive technologies: gender, motherhood and medicine, (Oxford: Polity press, 1987).
Maragarete Sandelowski, Devices and desires: gender, technology and American nursing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
*Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting was Born in Colonial India (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003).
Films: The Return of Martin Guerre; Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life; John Q; Junior; Born with Two Mothers, The Family Man, Sicko, Nazi Medicine: in the Shadow of the Reich, Lorenzo’s Oil, Batchelor Mother
Term 1 Fall
Week 1
Introduction: ‘Who do you think you are?’
What forms the basis of an individual’s identity? What about the identities that we apply to the people we see around us? How do we answer the question: ‘who do you think I am?’ What other types of ‘identity’ are there, and how can (and do) we assess, evaluate and apply them? This week we will explore the contemporary identities that define us today, and sketch out their historical origins.
No Required Reading
Theme One: Medicine, science, and the family
Week 2
Making Motherhood
It’s something of a truism that we take our mothers for granted –OK, so we may spring for chocolates or flowers on Mothering Sunday, but the rest of the year, their ‘motherliness’ is assumed rather than scrutinised or celebrated. Our culture, however, and our medical culture in particular, takes ‘motherhood’ very seriously indeed. Today, we will explore the role of medicine in shaping our perceptions, expectations, and understandings of motherhood from the late 19th century to the present. Why and when did doctors get into the business of offering mothers advice on pregnancy, birth, and childrearing? And who benefited most from their interventions? Did anyone lose out? How different is the relationship between motherhood and medicine today from the one that existed in at the turn of the 20th century?
Seminar topic: NO SEMINAR
Required Reading:
· Rima Apple ‘Constructing mothers: scientific motherhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ in Apple and Golden (eds), Mothers and Motherhood, 90-110 OR in Social history of medicine, Vol. 8, no. 2 (Aug. 1995), via Oxford Journals Archive online at University of Warwick Library.
· Michelle Stanworth, ‘Reproductive technologies and the deconstruction of motherhood’, in Stanworth, Reproductive technologies: gender, motherhood and medicine, (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987): 10-35.
Background and Further Reading:
Film: Batchelor Mother, 1939
Rima Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers University Press, 2006)
Board for Social Responsibility, ‘Marriage and the Family’ in Ruth Chadwick (ed.), Ethics, Reproduction and Genetic Control, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 1992): 53-62
Sarah-Vaughn Brakman, Sally J. Scholz, ‘Adoption, ART, and a Re-Conception of the Maternal Body: Toward Embodied Maternity’, Hypatia, Vol. 21, Number 1, Winter 2006, pp. 54-73
Fenella Cannell, ‘Concepts of Parenthood: The Warnock Report, the Gillick Debate, and Modern Myths’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 667-686
Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993)
Ellen Herman, “Families Made by Science: Arnold Gesell and the Technologies of Modern Child Adoption” Isis 92, 2001: 684-715.
Ellen Herman, ‘The Paradoxical Rationalization of Modern Adoption’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 36, Number 2, Winter 2002, pp. 339-385.