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, 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
- A grasp of the overall scope and intellectual approaches of at least two of the component disciplines which study health, medicine and the body
- An overview familiarity with selected concepts in those disciplines
- A familiarity with key points from the literature on health, medicine and the body
- An ability to evaluate studies from the above literatures critically
Relevant Degrees
Requirements
This minor requires the completion of 24 units, which must include:
12 units from completion of the following course(s):
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ANTH2026 | Medicine, Healing and the Body | 6 |
| ANTH2138 | Doing Medical Anthropology | 6 |
| BIAN2119 | Nutrition, Disease and the Environment | 6 |
| BIAN2130 | Ancient Medicine | 6 |
| BIOL2191 | Ecology of Health and Disease | 6 |
| GEND 2025: Gender, Health and Embodiment | ||
| GEND3001 | Posthuman Bodies | 6 |
| PSYC3020 | Health Psychology | 6 |
| SOCY2162 | Sociology of Health and Illness | 6 |
12 units from completion of the following course(s):
| Code | Title | Units |
|---|---|---|
| ANTH2130 | Violence and Terror | 6 |
| ANTH2132 | Food for Thought: Anthropological theories of food and eating | 6 |
| ARCH3028 | Archaeology of Death and Mortuary Practices | 6 |
| BIAN 2115: 'Race' & Human Genetic Var | ||
| BIAN2120 | Culture, Biology and Population Dynamics | 6 |
| BIAN2128 | Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology | 6 |
| BIAN3014 | Research Design and Analysis in Biological Anthropology | 6 |
| DEMO2001 | Understanding population change | 6 |
| ECON3004 | Health Economics | 6 |
| GEND2021 | Trauma, Memory and Culture | 6 |
| HIST2133 | Race and Racism in Western Culture, c.1450–1950 | 6 |
| PHIL2082 | Sex and Death: the Philosophy of Biology | 6 |
| PHIL 2085: Applied Ethics | ||
| SCOM 3001: Science, Risk & Ethics | ||
| SOCY2022 | Environmental Sociology | 6 |