ASCE x3594 Tyranny of the Normal
Representations of Medicine in Film and Culture

Introduction:

Doctors and researchers do not hold a monopoly on medical knowledge or beliefs.  While theirs may be more scientific, that does not make them necessarily more relevant to the study of the patient and of the illness.  Both the actualities and the metaphorical possibilities of illness and medicine abound in literature, film and modern culture.  These other “meanings” of disease, illness, organ transplants, genetic engineering and prosthesis have stirred debate about what it means to be an individual or even what it means to be human.  We will question the nature of medical knowledge itself.  Is our social knowledge of medicine becoming more complex commensurate with scientific developments, or is it primarily a reflection of literary and cultural traditions?

In this colloquium, we will read stories and essays by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Anton Chekov, Tony Kushner, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Karatani Kojin and Donna Haraway.  Since there will be a lot of critical reading, we will often use movies as text and consider visual representations of illness and the abnormal body.  We begin by discussing current medical beliefs and metaphors, such as “invading armies” of cancer, “high-risk groups,” social Darwinism and gendered constructions of illness.  We will use these lexical tools to consider advertisements for hospitals, health organizations and pharmaceuticals as well as media fads such as the Ebola scare.  We next switch to the tradition of medicine in literature and history to try to get at the origins of some of these ideas and meanings. For the final project, students will research modern representations of a medical issue of their choosing, trying to trace the construction and history of part of our social knowledge of medicine. 

Course Requirements:

Students are expected to complete the required readings and participate actively and intelligently in class discussion. In addition, films will be shown every week on Tuesday evening at 7:00, you must attend ten of them or see them on your own.  All films are on reserve in the Barnard Media Center.  One-page response papers are due the evening before every class.  Finally, students will write two formal papers (a 5-7 pp paper due mid-semester and a 12-15 pp paper due at the end of term).

Grading:

Participation: 30%, Response Papers: 20%, Short Paper (approx 2000 words): 20% Final Paper (approx 4000 words): 30%

Readings:

While readings in the following books are required, you are not required to purchase them. They are available for purchase at Labyrinth and are on reserve at Barnard and Butler Libraries. Additional readings will be available in a course pack. Some readings are available online.

1.  Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity  (New York: Norton, 1997).

2.  Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. (New York: Pantheon, 1984) 

3. Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001).

4. Online readings on courseworks and coursepack

Recommended books:  These books feature selections from which our readings are taken, but it is not necessary to purchase them.  They will be on reserve, and readings from them are in the course pack.

Haiken, Elizabeth. Venus Envy. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

Kevles, Bettyann. Naked to the Bone. (NY: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998)

Laqueur, Thomas and Catharine Gallagher, eds. The Making of the Modern Body. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)

Pernick, Martin S. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of 'Defective' Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Rothman, Sheila. Living in the Shadow of Death. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Pr., 1994)  

Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

Topics, Readings and Films  

Week 1 (Week of September 5) Shopping Period  [What does “medicine” mean?  What are the stakes of using film as a cultural product?] 

Porter, Roy, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine ch. 1,2,3.

Films: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, 80min), Blade Runner (1982, 117min)
 

Week 2 (September 14 film and 16 class) From Humors to Germs: A Quick Tour of the History of Medicine.

Porter, Roy, Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine ch. 4,5,6,7,8.  

Film: Dirty Pretty Things (2002, 97min) 

Week 3 (September, 21 film, 23 class) Introduction to the Historiography of Modern Medicine

* Brieger, Gert. "The Historiography of Medicine." In W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds. Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine. Vol. I. London: Routledge, 1997. 24-44.

John Harley Warner. “The History of Science and the Sciences of Medicine” Osiris (second series), 10 (1995), 164-193.

Judith Walzer Leavitt. "Medicine in Context: A Review Essay of the History of Medicine." American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 1471-1484.

* Rosenberg, Charles. "Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History." In, Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds. Framing Disease. Studies in Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xiii-xxvi.

* Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery. "Toward the Cultural Interpretation of Medicine." Literature and Medicine, 10 (1991), 1-17.

Film:  Ikiru (1954, 142min)

Week 4 (September 28 film, 30 class) Foucault and the History of Medicine

Foucault. The Foucault Reader. (ORDER)

"The Politics of Health in the 18th Century." (273-290)

"The Body of the Condemned" (170-178)

"Docile Bodies" (179-187)

"The Means of Correct Training (188-205)

"Panopticism" (206-213)
 

Film:  Memento (2000, 113 min)

Week 5 (October 5 film, 7 class) Doctor Narratives

* Epstein. Altered Conditions. Chs. 2, 3

* Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery. "Remaking the Case." Literature and Medicine, 11:1 (Spring 1992) 163-179.

Thomas Laqueur. “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.” In Lynn Hunt, ed. The New Cultural History. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 176-204

Film: Dead Ringers, (1988, 115 min)

Week 6 (October 12 film, 14 class) Patient Perspective (Short Paper Due in Film Section)

Roy Porter. “The Patient’s View. Doing Medical History from Below.” Theory and Society, 14 (1985), 167-174.

Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors      

* Karatani Kojin: “Sickness as Meaning” in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, (Durham, Duke UP) 97-114.

Recommended: 

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

Film: Wit (2001, 98 min)

Week 7 (October 19 film, 21 class) Plague, Epidemics, and Response

* Arno Karlen, Man and Microbes, New York: Putnam, 1995., chs 1,2.

* Watts, Sheldon, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, 1-40; 122-134.

* Poe, Edgar Allen, “The Masque of the Red Death”

* Boccaccio The Decameron, New York: Penguin, 2003., introduction.

Recommended:

Camus, Albert, The Plague,

Film:  The Seventh Seal (1957, 96 min)  [see also The Navigator, Nosferatu]
 

Week 8 (October 26 film, 28 class) Visual Culture I

Weldby, Catherine. "Virtual Anatomy: From the Body in the Text to the Body on the Screen." Journal of Medical Humanities, 21:2 (Summer 2000), 85-107.

* Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions, ch 1, 7 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

* Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film Theory and Cricism, fourth edition, Oxford: OUP, 1992.

* Studlar, Gaylyn “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema”

Recommended:

Kafka, Franz The Metamorphosis  

Film: Freaks (1932, 64 min)

Week 9 (no film screening this week, November. 4 class) Liminal States of Being

*  Donna Haraway, “Cyborgs and Symbionts Living Together in the New World Order” in Gray ed., The Cyborg Handbook 11-20.

* Balsamo, Anne “Reading Cyborgs, Writing Feminism: Reading the Body in Contemporary Culture” in Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women Durham: Duke UP, 1997, 17-40.

* N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago: UCP, 1999., p 1-50.

Recommended:

Huxley, Aldous Brave New World

Week 10 (November 9 film, 11 class) Visual Culture II

* Cartwright, Lisa, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995., 1-17, 81-107.

*  Ludmilla Jordanova. “Medicine and the Genres of Display.” In Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, eds. Visual Display. Culture Beyond Appearances. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 203-235;

Cartwright, Lisa. "'Experiments of Destruction': Cinematic Inscriptions of Physiology. Representations, 40 (1992), 129-152.

* Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle New York: Zone, 1994. p. 12-46.

Film: The Elephant Man (1980, 124 min)
 

Week 11 (November 16 film, 18 class)  Bodies I (Gender)

Thomas Laqueur . “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology.” In Making of the Modern Body, 1-41.

Mary Poovey, “‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character’: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of Victorian Women.” In Making of the Modern Body, 137-168.

Judith Zeitlin:  “Shared Dreams: Three Wives Commentary on The Peony Pavilion” in Harvard Journal of Asian Studies, June 1994, 127-179.

Recommended:

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

Film: Rosemary’s Baby (1968, 136 min)

Week 12 (No Class – Thanksgiving Holiday)

Film: ER, the pilot (84 min, 1994).

Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, New York: Norton, 2003.

Week 13 (November 30 film, December 2 class) Bodies II (Race)

*  Wailoo, Keith. Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Intro, ch. 2, conclusion 

Fields, Barbara, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America” in the new left review. 181 (May/June 1990). 95-118.

* Haraway, Donna, “The Persistence of Vision” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, 1-19.

Recommended:

Ibsen, Henrik, Ghosts; Kafka, Franz, The Metamorphosis.

Film: The Boys from Brazil (1978, 123 min)

Week 14 (December 7 film, 9 class) Bodies III (Plastic Surgery)

* Haiken, Elizabeth. Venus Envy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1999) Intro, Chs. 1, 3.

* Sander Gilman. "The Jewish Nose: Are Jews White? Or, The History of the Nose Job." In The Jew's Body. (NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 169-193.

* Anne Balsamo. "On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and New imaging Technologies." In Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 56-79

Film:  Nip / Tuck (2003, 84 min)
 

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