To familiarize with the field of medical history, critical competence on its intellectual vocabulary and a first introduction to its worldwide literature; to develop strategies for the interpretation of sources via this mode of enquiry.
Historical concepts of illness and disease.
1. Required reading:
Rob Boddice, Pain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017;
*Mirko Drazen Grmek, La vita, le malattie e la storia, Rome, Di Renzo, 1998;
Mirko Drazen Grmek, The Concept of Disease, in Id. (ed.), Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press;
Mirko Drazen Grmek, Le concept de maladie, in Id. (ed.), Histoire de la pensée médicale en Occident, vols 2 and 3;
*Roy Porter, What is Disease?, in Id. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medicine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 71-102.
2. Also, one of the following combinations of texts:
2a = *Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Il medico e la malattia. La scienza di Ippocrate, Turin, Einaudi, 1986 (La nozione della malattia, pp. 11-34);
+ Danielle Gourevitch, I giovani pazienti di Galeno. Per una patocenesi dell'impero romano, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2001;
or
2b = *Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010 (Sickness and Health, pp. 11-49);
+ *Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000 (Diseases, pp. 104-153).
3. Moreover, at least one among the following:
Maria Pia Donato, Morti improvvise. Medicina e religione nel Settecento, Rome, Carocci, 2010;
Barbara Duden, The woman beneath the skin: a doctor's patients in eighteenth-century Germany, trans. by T. Dunlap, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1991;
Georges Vigarello, Histoire des pratiques de santé. Le sain et le malsain depuis le Moyen Age (various titles and publishers since 1993).
| Author | Title | Publisher | Year | ISBN | Note |
| Mirko Drazen Grmek | La vita, le malattie e la storia | Di Renzo | 1998 | 978-8-886-04490-5 | |
| Rob Boddice | Pain: A Very Short Introduction | Oxford University Press | 2017 | 978-0-198-73856-5 |
Oral interview.
