Paper 3: Modern Medicine and Life Sciences (1780–present)
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from Section A and
three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal weighting.
SECTION A
1. “‘Medical science’, like ‘military intelligence’, is a contradiction in terms.” Does
your understanding of the history of science and medicine since 1750 support
such a cynical view?
2. To what extent did change originate within nineteenth and twentieth-century
medicine, natural history, and biology, and to what extent from without?
3. “The history of modern medicine should focus not on the eminent doctors and
scientists who named or cured diseases, but on the perspectives of patients
who suffered from those diseases.” What are the advantages and
disadvantages of this approach?
SECTION B
4. “The rise of medicine as a profession in the mid-nineteenth century sounded
the death knell for women’s participation in healing practices.” Assess this
claim.
5. Was there a “bacteriological revolution” in late nineteenth-century medicine?
6. “Disease germs are the most democratic creatures in the world: they know no
‘distinction of race, color or previous condition of servitude’” (American Journal
of Public Health, 1915). Discuss with reference to the history of twentiethcentury medicine.
7. Is it generally true that reproductive technologies have been developed on
animals first and then applied to women?
8. Discuss the role of patents in the development of biotechnology.
9. “The experimental approach to the challenge of disease assures us that the
Golden Age of Medicine we now enjoy will extend far into the future” (President
of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1956). Discuss the significance of such
claims for the history of twentieth-century medicine.
10. Why did health policymakers advocate for “health for all” in the 1970s?
11. How did public health policies between 1950 and 1989 reflect global Cold War
tensions?
12. How did agricultural science advance the objectives of the Atoms for Peace
initiative?