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The explosive outbreak of COVID-19 transformed the world we inhabit. Within months of its first report in late December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 infected hundreds of millions of bodies, triggered quarantine of billions of people, and wiped out trillions of dollars of market value. Unlike most other diseases, COVID-19 has highlighted both the interconnectivity of global environments and societies and the inadequacy of the health systems put in place to control emerging diseases. Were we always so vulnerable to disease? How did previous generations deal with emerging and existing health challenges?

Contagion & Control draws on new research from across the medical humanities and sciences to introduce students to over 200 years of disease control efforts, the effects of globalisation in spreading disease landscapes and health systems across the world, and the conflicting pressures shaping current global health. Students will learn how crises like COVID-19 are rooted in the dramatic changes that global disease environments presented and the ways humans manage their health over the past 200 years. During this time, population growth, mass migration, and climate change connected and transformed erstwhile distinct disease environments. Biologically, previously local diseases like cholera and HIV spread around the globe. Culturally, the rise of medical science in the nineteenth century replaced older humoral ideas about illness. Politically, these changes were closely associated with the rise of powerful industrialised nation states and colonial empires, which depended on new forms of medicine to secure their hold on power.

Students will explore the relationships between disease, race, climate, environment, and imperialism in the nineteenth century. They will study biomedical interventions like vaccines against smallpox, typhoid, rinderpest, and other diseases, improved sanitation, and how drug treatments like antibiotics played an important role in improving human and animal health in the twentieth century. The health systems in which these medical interventions were embedded, such as the socialist systems of the communist sphere or the semi-private systems in the Americas, as well as the increasing international coordination of health politics, enabled unprecedented levels of centralised control over people's lives. The resulting tensions between the desire to implement uniform top-down health policies and calls for more nuanced, culturally-attuned policies, which co-rely on local actors like traditional healers, persist to this day, as do tensions between strengthening basic health care and prioritising more targeted technological interventions like vaccines. Understanding these tensions as part of the broader mutual evolution of societies, diseases, environments, and health systems improves our knowledge of the past and provides valuable insights for the global health challenges of the present.

To facilitate interdisciplinary attendance and scheduling, this module will be delivered in the form of lectures and seminars. The classes are fixed for the evening in order to allow for broad-based participation across multiple colleges.