Do No Harm: Health, Disease, and Society from Antiquity to Today

Human health is a precarious matter. COVID-19 has laid bare not only the fragility of our bodily well-being on a mass scale, but it has exposed both the social ties and fault lines which define communities. The ills of the body politic—its institutional failings and systemic inequities—have reproduced themselves in the sick bodies of its citizens. The traumatic visibility of these events has sparked calls to radically reimagine our communities, to re-envision the ways in which we live, labor, govern and take care of one another. But it also demands that we consider the nature of health itself and what it means to be healthy. Was, or is, health ever solely the matter of sound and invisible bodily functioning? Where does the healthy, individual body begin and the web of interpersonal, economic, political, even religious forces surrounding it end? That is, when is the body not the body politic?

This seminar will address these questions and more by exploring conceptions of health, disease, and ways of taking care from the ancient world to modernity. Moving from the palace cultures of ancient Babylon and pharaonic Egypt to the city states of Greece and cosmopolis of Rome, we will examine how early medical ideas of health and sickness were contoured and contested by prevailing social, economic, and religious factors. But so too, similar and shifting pressures influence our ideas of “wellness” today, as gym memberships and cold-pressed juice betoken lifestyle as much as of health, and vaccination becomes a shibboleth of political affiliation. While (happily) the differences between our world and Galen’s remain many and substantial, it remains true that a deep exploration of ancient health can reveal profound truths about our own health-scape. This seminar is designed for historians and faculty who teach across interdisciplinary disciplines, the sciences, and the humanities.