Paper 3: Modern Medicine and Life Sciences
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from Section A and
three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal weighting.
You should spend no more than three hours on answering all the questions, and a
word limit is set of no more than 1,500 words per answer.
All your answers for this paper should be submitted in one DOC, DOCX or PDF
document. Each answer should be clearly headed with the question number and the
question.
Put your Blind Grade Number (BGN) at the start of the document. Do not put your
name anywhere in the document.
SECTION A
1. How and to what extent were medicine and the life sciences “internationalised”
in the twentieth century?
2. Did industrialisation make people healthier?
3. Did the rise of experimental biology make biological collections obsolete? Why
or why not?
SECTION B
4. “In the nineteenth century arguments about the constitution of medical
knowledge were arguments about the organization of society.” Explain this
statement.
5. To what extent, and with what consequences, had diseases come to be
regarded as “specific processes defined by laboratory work” (Christopher
Lawrence, 2006) by the early twentieth century?
6. Who might have voiced opposition to changes in the management of hospitals
in the first half of the twentieth century and why?
7. Assess the roles of state and industrial actors in bringing new pharmaceuticals
to the market since around 1900.
8. How, and with what consequences, did new social movements challenge the
authority of medicine after World War II?
9. Who gained and who lost by the introduction of farming practices with
potentially harmful consequences for health?
10. Which social, economic and political factors motivated the eugenics movement
around 1900?
11. Has the so-called Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology resulted in new
understandings of race and racism after World War II?
12. Should we consider post-World War II molecular biology and/or ecology as
having been “nuclear sciences”?