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.