Welcome - Health and Disease in Medieval Society
HIST 3916 Health and Disease in Medieval Society
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Welcome to Health and Disease in Medieval Society, a historical introduction to how medieval people thought about bodies, sickness, and healing. The basic medical framework of medieval Europe and the Near East was inherited from the doctors of ancient Greece. But the medieval world was confronted with new diseases that ancient healers did not know, or never wrote about, most notoriously leprosy and plague. These two diseases are often considered the archetypal illnesses of the Middle Ages, as they transformed or devastated entire communities in the eleventh through sixteenth centuries. In this course we will study general concepts of disease and illness in the Middle Ages and perform more focused analyses of how leprosy and plague were interpreted in the later Middle Ages through a complex framework of scientific, religious, and socioeconomic ideas.
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