HIST 5202 - Women’s Health and Medicine in U.S. History

• Describe conditions in the public arena from the 18th through the 20th centuries that affected women’s ability to care for others and keep themselves healthy, especially the presence or absence in urban areas of sewers, potable water, and pure food.
• Describe how attitudes toward the inability to bear children have changed in American history.
• Describe the domestic conditions from the 17th through the 20th centuries that affected women’s ability to care for others and keep themselves healthy.
• Describe the historical evolution of American health policy and how the inadequacies and inequities inherent in that policy have impacted women’s lives in the 20th century.
• Describe the historical, social, and cultural forces that shape our definition of health and our notions of appropriate and beneficial medical treatment.
• Describe the social and economic impact that access to birth control has had on women’s lives in the last 200 years.
• Discuss the American propensity to assign individual, as opposed to societal, responsibility for disease occurrence.
• Explain how and why women, in conjunction with the medical community, began to pathologize lactation in the late 19th-century.
• Explain under what historical conditions societies have both accepted and rejected abortion.
• Explain under what historical conditions societies have developed ideologies both encouraging and discouraging birth control.
• Explain why birthing practices changed from the social births of the 17th and 18th centuries to the medicalized births of the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Explain why breast cancer went from being an invisible, ignored disease for most of U.S. history to being a disease defined as a serious public health problem worthy of public attention and dollars in the late 20th-century.
• List the major themes in the history of women’s health and medicine.