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.
Begin each answer on a separate sheet.
Write legibly and on only one side of the paper.
Answers must be tied up in separate bundles, marked 1, 2, 3, etc.
according to the number of the question.
Attach a completed coversheet to each bundle and complete a master
coversheet listing all questions attempted. It is essential that you write
your examination number and not your name on the coversheet and on
each bundle.
You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent
pages of this question paper until instructed to do so by the
invigilator.
Page 2 of 2
SECTION A
1. “It makes no sense to write a history of ‘science and medicine’ because
there have been so many different kinds of science.” Discuss.
2. How have changes in the way biology and medicine are patronised been
reflected in how they are practised?
3. “It has made less difference whether medicine was practised in a
hospital, a laboratory or in the community than in what historical period it
was done.” Discuss.
SECTION B
4. What roles have men played in the history of reproductive technologies?
5. “Reductionism has been the driving ethos of twentieth-century biology.”
Discuss.
6. To what degree has patenting helped or hindered biomedical science?
7. Was medicine a science or an art in the first two-thirds of the twentieth
century?
8. “The term tropical medicine does not imply merely the treatment of
tropical diseases. Rather, it implies a science of medicine and, more
importantly, a medicine for the empire, where diseases were the great
enemies of civilization.” Discuss.
9. Did medicine become militarised during World War II and stay militarised
after it?
10. How did nineteenth-century doctors learn to see bodies in new ways?
11. How did the emergence of the germ theory of disease affect discourses
of race and ethnicity?
12. What role did twentieth-century processes of decolonisation play in the
history of global health?