Disease and Society in History

This course on the history of disease and society at the University of California, Riverside (HIST 107,) offers a platform for thinking historically about the current COVID-19 outbreak. We will take a comparative approach, looking to historical events across time and space to understand what is unique to the present moment. The history of disease is a history of massive population change and social and cultural transformations. Disease played a central role in the success of European colonization, beginning in sixteenth-century Mexico and South America. In Europe and the United States, disease prompted state-run hygienic reforms such as the building of sewers. It led to strict regulation of where people lived and how they behaved. The history of disease is also tied up with cultural images of the body, health and sex. The primary aim of the course is to grasp the complex and reciprocal relationship between society and disease. We examine how cultures, states and individuals shape the spread of contagious disease. Conversely, we analyze how disease affects the societies into which it enters. Disease participated in some of the great structural transformations in human history. We are living through one right now.