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, so no more than 6,000
words for the whole paper.
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. What kind of science has played the largest role in the development of
medicine since 1750? Why?
2. “Historians of modern medicine and life sciences have focused too much on
hospitals and laboratories and too little on textbooks and newspapers.” Assess
this claim.
3. Discuss the significance of international networks to the history of medicine and
the life sciences since 1800.
SECTION B
4. Were nineteenth-century medical practitioners “quintessentially modern
heroes”?
5. Some historians have described cholera as the “emblematic disease of the
nineteenth century”? Do you agree.
6. Why was it so difficult for radiographs to become the standard means of
diagnosing various medical conditions, despite the relative ease with which
Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays could be replicated?
7. Account for the incorporation of laboratory technologies into clinical medicine in
the decades around 1900.
8. “Inevitably, as I see it, we can look forward to something like a penicillin for
cancer, and I hope within the next decade” (Cornelius Rhoads, 1953).
Contextualize this claim.
9. What difference did activism make to medical science between the 1960s and
the 1980s?
10. Are medical technologies gendered? Discuss in relation to the obstetric forceps
and the oral contraceptive pill.
11. How did efforts to define racial difference affect medical practice in British
colonies in the nineteenth century?
12. How does the history of sickle-cell anaemia reflect broader transformations in
the relationship between race and medicine over the course of the twentieth
century?
13. Explain the difference between vertical and horizontal approaches to
international health, using historical examples.
14. Evelyn Fox Keller maintains that the twentieth century was the “century of the
gene”. Do you agree?
15. What role have natural history museums played in the development of modern
biology?