Health, Medicine and the Body Minor

Total units 24 Units

Areas of interest Biological Anthropology, Policy Studies, Public Health
Minor code HMAB-MIN

Academic career Undergraduate
Academic Contact Dr Fouzieyha Towghi

Understanding the nature of health, sickness, and healing necessarily includes exploration of the historical, social, cultural, and economic contexts in which illness is defined and understood. It is in these contexts also that medical systems and specific sets of health care practices arise and evolve.

The wider study of health and medicine thus involves a number of disciplines, whose perspectives can complement and deepen the understandings derived from scientific knowledge and training in clinical skills that take primacy in medical training.

These include fields such as socio-cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, medical anthropology, population health, the sociology of health and illness, health psychology, the history of medicine, philosophy and ethics, and gender studies.

This minor provides the opportunity for students to combine later-year courses in related disciplines to explore the broader social contexts of health and the development of medical knowledge and bodily practice.

Learning Outcomes

demonstrate understanding of the scope and intellectual approaches of at least two of the component disciplines to the study of health, medicine and the body;
demonstrate understanding of the selected concepts and theories in those disciplines to the study of health, medicine, and the body;
demonstrate understanding of the key points from the literature on health, medicine and the body; and
demonstrate an ability to analyse and evaluate studies from the above literatures critically.