Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

Course Overview

This course looks at medicine from a cross-cultural perspective, focusing on the human, as opposed to biological, side of things. Students learn how to analyze various kinds of medical practice as cultural systems. Particular emphasis is placed on Western (bio-) medicine; students examine how biomedicine constructs disease, health, body, and mind, and how it articulates with other institutions, national and international.

Requirements

In addition to doing all of the reading (approximately 100 pages a week, except for the Fadiman, Farmer, Kleinman, and Scheper-Hughes books, which are easier to read than the articles), you will write three short (6+ pp.) papers on topics assigned during the semester. There is no midterm or final exam. In addition to the formal papers, you will write a brief Reader Response to one of the readings each week. These should be an actual response to the piece—your own reaction to it, rather than a summary or analysis. They should be posted on the course's Web site before the class in which the reading is assigned. These are not graded, but they are required.

Late papers lose a letter grade a day unless you have secured a written extension from me at least 24 hours prior to the due date. You'll need to give me a specific new due date. These can be obtained via e-mail.

Attendance is required. The course's discussion component is crucial; you must come to class prepared to discuss the assigned reading. Do not take this course if you plan on cutting classes—you will receive a failing grade.

Grading

Grading will be based as follows:

Students will present a five-minute summary of their third written assignment in class at the end of the course. These oral presentations will not be graded.

Texts

The readings required for each session are found directly under the title for that day's class.

The syllabus includes each article's full bibliographic citations, to allow you to know where they originally appeared and, more importantly, when. Readings are available at the class Web site.

The following are recommended for purchase:

Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998. ISBN: 9780374525644.

Farmer, Paul. AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780520248397.

Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing & the Human Condition. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1989. ISBN: 9780465032044.

Luhrmann, T. M. Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry. New York, NY: Knopf, 2000. ISBN: 9780679421917.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780520075375.

Five films will be shown during the semester:

"Back From Madness: The Struggle for Sanity." Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities, 1996.

"The Deadly Deception." Boston, MA: WGBH Educational Foundation, 1993.

"The Search for Satan." Frontline, October 24, 1995. Boston, MA: WGBH Educational Foundation, 1995.

"Simple Courage." Honolulu, HI: KHET, 1992.

"The Lynchburg Story." New York, NY: Filmmakers Library, 1993.

Warning: Plagiarism

Plagiarism, presenting someone else's work as your own, comes in two forms, both extremely serious. The first involves using the words of a source, exactly or in very close paraphrase, without proper citation. If you are citing word-for-word, it does not suffice to footnote the source you must use quotation marks. If you are paraphrasing someone's work, you must fully cite the work, including the exact page number of the page on which the material appears. Do not think that just because work is "in the public domain," on the Net, etc., you do not need to provide a full citation. If it's someone else's work, then it's not your work and you need to fully cite the source.

The second form of plagiarism involves taking ideas from a source without footnoting the source.

Although sanctions for plagiarism in this course depend on its severity, failing the course is a distinct possibility. I have failed students in the past, and they have also had to appear before the committee on discipline. Bottom line: this course takes plagiarism very seriously. Suspicious papers receive immediate attention.

If you have questions about how to cite sources, see me. The readings for the course provide good examples of proper citation practice.