Blood Germs Sick Bodies Biomedicine In History

AY2018/2019 Semester 1

Biomedicine has considerably changed the modern human life in the globalizing world. This course offers a topic survey in the history of global biomedicine and its cultural impacts. You will learn the histories of the rise of the biomedical industries which include pharmaceutical companies, their patrons, and the network of hospitals, physicians, and biomedical scientists, alongside another rising power, the patient activist groups. The course content includes the birth of germ theories of disease, use of humans in biomedicine, organ transplantation, tissue culture, birth control, holism in medical research, the relations between the normal and the pathological, managing health, biocapitalism, immunology, and Asian biomedicine, and contemporary virological research.