GEG6145 - Historical Geographies of Medicine: From Imperial Hygiene to Global Health - 2024/25

This module explores the relationship between medicine and projects of European imperial expansion. 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.