Health and Medicine

For those with interests in health and medicine, anthropology offers a powerful lens for examining healing practices and diverse understandings of life (and death).  Students examine the distribution of illness, the ethics of medicine, and the politics of the body within a global framework. This pathway through the major hones your ability to define the structural components of health, a skill that is critical to medical practice. It also teaches you how to attend to cultural differences, develops your ability to work with diverse populations, and provides the methodological tools for research across various dimensions of health.  The Health & Medicine pathway includes a range of courses that teach students to think subtly about the way that health and its limits are shaped by culture, society, and politics. Students learn to investigate economic and legal structures, international and global health efforts, technologies of regulation, and management of expertise, as well as historically grounded practices of care and healing.

Watch this "Anthropology Minor for Pre-Health Students" video to learn more about how Anthropology can help prepare students for a career in Medicine.

This pathway through the major could include these courses:

  • ANTHR 2245 Health & Disease in the Ancient World 

  • ANTHR 2424 Culture and Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives

  • ANTHR 2468 Medicine, Culture and Society 

  • ANTHR 2546 South Asian Religions in Practice:  The Healing Traditions

  • ANTHR 2750 Human Biology and Evolution 

  • ANTHR 3235 Bioarchaeology 

  • ANTHR 3413 Anthropology of Global Health 

  • ANTHR 3465 Anthropology of the Body 

  • ANTHR 3620 A Global Controversy: How to Study a Human Rights Violation 

  • ANTHR 4114 Science, Medicine, the Body:  A Critical Race and Feminist Inquiry

  • ANTHR 4246 Human Osteology 

  • ANTHR 4442 Toxicity 

  • ANTHR 4448 Death, Dying, and the Dead  

  • ANTHR 4467 Self and Subjectivity  

  • ANTHR 4682 Healing & Medicine in Africa 

  • Other courses from Anthropology or other units with departmental approval.
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