Aims

Human health has always been interlinked with that of the environment and this is becoming an increasingly urgent matter for public health policy. This module will look at key ways in which humans have adapted their environment (mainly focusing on the period from around 1800) in relation to their own concerns regarding health and disease. Through a series of key case studies over time and place including the historic understanding of air in relation to both health and disease, students will gain an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of such debates and the interrelationships between human and environmental health. They will also gain an understanding of how people in the past conceived the relationship between different environments and health and how that has changed over time. Although predominately focused on Britain, the module will consider transnational and global contexts in relation to the use of forests for the treatment of Tuberculosis in Germany and Australia as well as the development of strategies to deal with malaria and yellow fever in India and the US.

This module aims:
• To introduce students to historical research and to guide them in the analysis of primary documents and texts.
• To provide an opportunity to acquire a sound general knowledge of the subject, reading widely and critically in the primary and secondary literature associated with it and to develop the capacity for independent study.
• To enable students to develop an understanding of the interconnections between concepts of human health and disease and environmental health over the past two centuries.

Outline Of Syllabus

The following are some of the topics typically included in seminars:

• The miasmatic city - how the the nineteenth century urban landscape is conceived as a sink of disease

• The countryside as a therapeutic landscape – the placement of hospitals asylums, sanatoria, convalescent homes and open-air schools away from the polluted city.

• The seaside and coastal areas for health – from nineteenth-century sea-bathing to late twentieth century concerns over coastal purity and human health.

• The magic mountain – the use of mountains for health cures including tuberculosis and hay-fever, as well as the creation of colonial hill stations in India.

• The forest – The role of forests and trees in the cure of tuberculosis in Germany, the UK and Australia as well as an examination of ‘forest bathing’ as current concept.

• Lungs of the city – urban parks as public health infrastructure from Victoria Park in London in the 1840s to present day arguments concerning public parks as healthy, bio-diverse spaces.

• The city as a garden – changes in urban planning for environmental and human health. Benjamin Ward Richardson’s Hygeia and the Garden City movement then and now.

• Smoke gets in your lungs – from the movement for smoke abatement in the nineteenth century, through the great smog in London in the 1950s to current air pollution concerns in relation to reduced life expectancy and health.

• Climate change and Biodiversity loss – considering human-nature interactions and how past actions have both present and future impacts.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Discussion of the key debates in the shifting understanding of human and environmental health will take place during seminars. Alongside these sessions, there will be a series of workshops. One of these will be one to develop their skills in locating and analysing primary sources and two further workshops will help the students to gain communication skills so that they can produce a creative piece (either a short podcast, blog, poster or video) which will be aimed at a public audience and place current debates around climate change, air pollution, green space of health etc in their historic context. This will develop the students’ public communication tools - digital and other techniques - as well as an awareness of contemporary environmental and health debates. To encourage both creativity and to make the project work accessible to all students, they will be able to choose from visual, written and sound outputs for the creative element. This will be supplemented with an introductory lecture introducing students to the module and two drop-in sessions so students are able to get individual and tailored advice in relation to their assignments.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The essay tests knowledge outcomes and develops skills in research, reading and writing.

The formative plan and summative creative project component fosters engaged and personalised learning, as well as developing transferable communication skills. The creative project in particular is designed to test the ability of students to communicate complex ideas on the historical basis of current challenges in relation to human and environmental health to a non-specialist audience.

Work submitted during the delivery of the module forms a means of determining student progress.

Study-abroad, non-Erasmus exchange and Loyola students spending semester 1 only are required to finish their assessment while in Newcastle. Where an exam is present, an alternative form of assessment will be set and where coursework is present, an alternative deadline will be set. Details of the alternative assessment will be provided by the module leader.