HIST 390 Health & Healing in the Atlantic

Health & Healing in the Atlantic

How have ideas of health and healing been reimagined across the Atlantic world in an age of migration, empire, medical experiments, and urbanization? This class examines medicine as a historical process of making meaning and a crucial arena shaping culture, politics, and everyday life. Case studies include the adoption of African healing practices in the Western Atlantic; the interplay between "witchcraft," "magic," and European popular science in the Caribbean; colonial psychiatry and debates about racial madness in North Africa; African American interpretations of eugenics; and the emergence of underground pharmacies in response to global medical monopolies.