Courtney McColgan
HIS399: Top Revolutionary Medicine
5/9/2023
Dr. DeCoster
Final Reflection
Coming into this course, I was unsure what to expect for the semester as the topic at first glance seemed expansive. However, going through the course material and consuming each book over the last several months brought about a whole new perspective on medicine as it is practiced today, compared to previous measures. We were able to look at different countries and how medicine developed during periods of revolution and how these changing times influenced the spread of both disease and medicine. Take the first book we read, for example, Bloodwork introduced the practice of bloodletting and blood transfusions in a unique perspective that ordinarily nobody would have ever heard of. The battle between England and France in their discoveries of circulatory work and the act of blood transfusions led to its eventful ban for over a hundred years. This would be lifted and lead to more resounding work being done to follow. Contagion of Liberty showed us the influence that smallpox and inoculation had on the American Revolution, which showed a completely different perspective to the history I’ve always known. While the Citizen-Patient outlined a large part of modern medicine’s beginnings in France and its relationship with the French Revolution. These all brought about a connection to how medicine can be viewed in modern-day society, and compared to its quite tumultuous past.
This course allowed me to work on the ability to look at different eras of history from the perspective of the time period, as we’ve consistently stated in this class, history is like a foreign country. A large part of our discussions was made up of the astonishment by the facts of each book we read and just how different things were compared to now. This was both relevant for just how progressive we are now and just how surprisingly certain aspects of history were progressive back then. Given my prior coursework at UNE, a handful of other classes I’ve taken have been history related and a skill I’ve always struggled with is trying to look at the past unbiased from my present-day narrative. I think through this class and specifically with the seminar-based discussions we had, I was able to work on being able to do just that. If we are to look at history with only a modern-day perspective, then we would never learn anything from the past, we would simply be judging it for what it is and not understanding what truly happened. This course’s emphasis on understanding that what we view as horrendous or out of the ordinary in present-day could be just as easily applicable to the past by looking at the present. These skills were exemplified in a lot of how I handled the discussions in class and came up with questions for our group days. As the class progressed I tried to put myself less in a present-day perspective and more rooted in the past when examining each book to try to understand the history we were learning about.
In the grand scheme of my UNE education, a majority of my education has been based on critical thinking and analysis no matter what the content may be. As an animal behavior major a lot of this work is based scientifically, but the premise is all the same. Comparing the critical thinking and analysis that was demonstrated in this class compared to my other coursework related to my major they have both similarities and differences to them. A majority of my classwork in my major-based classes relies heavily on scientific journal articles, like one class that I took, Comparative Animal Behavior. For that reason, a lot of the work that I do is based on analyzing and picking apart these articles for the most relevant information, not too dissimilar to what we’ve done in this class. However, what differed from picking apart a scientific journal article, in comparison to a historical book like the ones we read for this class were the varied levels of critical thinking involved. For example, when you’re trying to understand a journal article, typically you’ll read the abstract, then jump to the conclusion, then up to the methods, and so forth. When you’re trying to understand content like the book’s that we’ve read it’s about taking it in and understanding the narrative as a whole, rather than cherry-picking from section to section. When reading Comparative Animal Behavior I was always analyzing for the main conclusion and the results of that article to think about, while in this course it was more than just a singular conclusion. There were a lot more moving parts to be looking at and analyzing that made critical thinking different when comparing the two different coursework.
