MF9322 – Medical history: sources, methods and historiographic questions

This course provides an opportunity for critical academic reflection, taking your own research project as the departure. In this course, we help you historicize your project and give you some basic skills in academic history. You will learn some basic theoretical and methodological concepts in the field of history, know more about how historians produce their knowledge in a scientific way, and you will learn how to search for a well-researched article in medical history. A two-day course is clearly not enough time to give a substantial introduction to the history of medicine as such, but you will get a crash course on the history of important events. In order for you to understand how historians do research and write their academic texts, we select one topic in the history of medicine where you will read and discuss texts. Currently, this topic is the history of global health. Substantial time in the course will be dedicated to discussing your own projects in a historical perspective, and together we will discuss the heuristic and methodological challenges that characterize the subject of medical history. We will place special emphasis on how to identify and work with relevant sources, thus helping you prepare your exam. The ambition is that after completing this course, you will have the structure of your exam paper and an outline of the most important sources you will use. By historicizing your own project both during the course and when writing the exam, you will be able to reflect academically on your own project, a skill that is important when you will write up the introduction to your thesis. This course is designed for students that are writing phds that are not in the history of medicine.

Knowledge

Upon completion of the course, students should be able to:

• Describe key events in the history of medicine
• Explain how to search for secondary literature in medical history and how this differs from other medical research literature searches
• Describe the characteristics of an academic medical history text
• Describe how historians find their primary sources
• Explain how to formulate a medical history research question
• Explain how historical research differs from biomedical research
• Describe basic skills in medical history research, such as distinguishing between different types of sources, historical methods and source criticism

Skills

Upon completion of this course, the student should be able to

• Know the difference between primary and secondary sources
• Discuss significant differences between medical history prose and a text written within the biomedical tradition
• Critically discuss scientific theoretical aspects of their own project in light of historical developments
• Based on their own project, discuss how medical concepts, knowledge and practice change in line with changing societal conditions and how medicine is influenced by and itself influences a societies’ development
• Give examples of how social and political conditions have influenced the development of medical knowledge, using examples from their own project
• Historicise their own research project using primary and secondary sources

General Competence

• Reflect on how medical concepts, knowledge, practice and research methodology change over time.

PhD candidates at University of Oslo will be prioritized, and within this group the highest priority is given to PhD candidates who are working on research that entails/will entail qualitative interviewing and/or participant observation.

Applicants admitted to a PhD programme at UiO apply to this course in StudentWeb.

Applicants who are not admitted to a PhD programme at UiO must apply for a right to study before they can apply to this course. See information here: How to apply for a right to study and admission to elective PhD courses in medicine and health sciences.

Applicants will receive a reply to the course application in StudentWeb at the latest one week after the application deadline.

The maximum number of course participants is 16.

The course will take place over two full days.

We expect that you send a ½ page abstract of your PhD project until four weeks before the course’s start. We shall use it in teaching and you should therefore expect that it is to be shared with other of the course’s participants.

You have to participate in at least 80 % of the seminars to be allowed to take the exam. Attendance will be registered.

Types of teaching: Seminars on chosen subjects from medical history, group discussions on prescribed reading and individually guided work when it comes to identifying sources for one’s own work. The course’s calculated number of study points includes preparatory reading.

It is expected that participants participate both in such work and contribute results from it in the class room. The provided reading will in part be of a type unfamiliar to participants who do not have a background in humanities. It is recommended to take this into consideration through staring one’s ow preparation early.

Individuel written assignment with submission deadline three weeks after the end of the course.

You may write your examination paper in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English.

Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale. Read more about the grading system.