TOPICS COURSE - 1.5 credits
Course Description: This course will thematically explore the engagement of Jews with medicine, public health, and bioethics. Over the course of the semester we will look at the ways that Jews imagined health, illness, and the body, as well as the way that non-Jews imagined the Jewish body and health. Of particular interest are those moments and places where ideas of Jewishness, and Judaism are relevant to the question of medicine, conceptualizations of health and wellness, nutrition, and the idea of the Jewish body.
Some of the topics to be explored are Jewish folk medicine, Jewish involvement in tenement reform, race science, and Jewish responses to bioethics questions such as abortion and euthanasia.
