This course explores the intellectual history of scientific racism, paying close attention to how its theories influence power and institutions today. Reading primary sources from the history of science, each class will trace the reverberations of scientific racism in media, education, politics, law, and global health. Our conversations will consistently analyze the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and age in the legacies of scientific racism. We will also examine the impact of scientific racism in public discourse about the Black Lives Matter Movement and collectively brainstorm for activism towards restorative justice.

This course examines mental health, from the increasingly biological models espoused by psychiatric practitioners, to spiritual, social, and political understandings of psychic distress and healing. It investigates contemporary trends in mental health practice, exploring how diagnostic criteria are created and inhabited, experiments in pharmaceutical thinking, and alternative psychotherapeutic approaches across a variety of historical and social contexts. The class will explore how social worlds are shaped by mental health categories, and how identities, politics, economics, and philosophies contend, produce, and confront psychic distress.

While diseases are often imagined to be scientific or medical conditions, they are also social constructs. In the 19th century the condition of Dysaesthesia Aethiopis (an ailment that made its sufferers "mischievous") was considered nearly universal among free blacks. Today AIDS and tuberculosis are often associated with personal attributes, while the social forces at work to structure risk for acquiring these illnesses are glossed over. We will examine work from anthropologists, sociologists, historians, queer studies scholars and scientists who work on issues of disability to investigate how people challenge contemporary visions of society.

How do immune systems work, and why do they work as they do? Why is there so much immunological polymorphism? To address these questions, students will examine immunology across multiple biological scales. At the molecular and cellular scales, students will learn mechanisms by which animals recognize and kill parasites. At the population scale, students will investigate causes of immunological heterogeneity. Both the clinical relevance (including to COVID-19) and the evolutionary basis of heterogeneity will be emphasized.

This course explores fundamental issues in health policy in the global and domestic context. Through lectures, discussion, and case studies, we will examine interdisciplinary frameworks and methods for addressing challenges in public health. We will explore the complex interactions and tradeoffs in policy interventions to improve health; the role of various stakeholders in health care systems; and the social, economic, and political constraints affecting health policy. Students will gain foundational knowledge surrounding the global burden of disease and strategic skills to assess and influence health policy.

Bioethics was named in 1970. Its etymology, however, is from the ancient Greek. We will put ancient and modern conceptions of human flourishing in conversation by exploring how naturalizing medicine has historically shaped the nature of birth, death, and mind. What is at stake in invoking the Greeks when constructing the ethics of modern medicine? How can reading ancient Greek texts in context help us think critically and imaginatively about ethical challenges in medicine today? We will examine how the formation of a medical tradition around the physical body creates persistent practical and philosophical questions in the clinic and beyond.

This course will consider the principles, development, outcomes and future directions of therapeutic applications of biotechnology, with particular emphasis on the interplay between basic research and clinical experience. Topics to be discussed include production of hormones and other protein drugs, nucleic acid drugs and vaccines, gene therapy and gene editing, and molecular diagnostics. Reading will largely be from the primary literature.

Viruses are unique parasites of living cells and may be the most abundant, highest evolved life forms on the planet. The general strategies encoded by all known viral genomes are discussed using selected viruses as examples. A part of the course is dedicated to the molbio (tactics) inherent to these strategies. Another part introduces the biology of engagement of viruses with host defenses, what happens when virus infection leads to disease, vaccines and antiviral drugs, and the evolution of infectious agents and emergence of new viruses. These topics are intertwined with discussions of modern technologies that benefit the field of virology.

Within a broad context of historical, social, and ethical concerns, a survey of normal childhood development and selected disorders from the perspectives of the physician, the biologist, and the bioethicist. There is an emphasis on the complex relationship between genetic and acquired causes of disease, the environment, medical practice, social conditions, and cultural values. The course features visits from children with some of the conditions discussed, site visits, and readings from the original medical, scientific, and bioethical literature.

Introduces the transdisciplinary field of trauma studies by examining visions of humanity from the Global South that prioritize alternative narratives and paradigms of healing individual and collective trauma. Re-orienting healing as a decolonizing process enables students to re-politicize personal trauma as it intersects with global legacies of violence, war, racism, slavery, patriarchy, colonialism, orientalism, homophobia, ableism, capitalism, and extractivism. The course participates in a new project to help illuminate how the humanities itself can offer new paths to understanding trauma and healing.

We suffer. Sometimes more, sometimes less - but we all suffer, and often profoundly. What is it about the human condition that seems to make suffering inevitable? What can we do to deal with it? One approach is to try to change the external conditions causing the trouble. A very different approach sees the most important change as being within ourselves. Can we eliminate - or at least assuage - our suffering by changing the way we direct our attention (Netflix...), by changing the way we experience (drugs...), or by changing our manner of desiring (spiritual practices...)? We will approach these questions practically and theoretically.