Paper 3: Modern Medicine and Life Sciences
You should answer three questions. 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.
1. Assess the case for and against the view that the French Revolution marks a
sharp break in medical history.
2. Assess the claim that new technologies revolutionized surgery in the nineteenth
century.
3. Why did some medical practitioners in the nineteenth century remain
unconvinced that bacteria caused disease?
4. Why did some elite English physicians reject science in the early twentieth
century?
5. What made medical experiments involving human subjects controversial in the
twentieth century?
6. How have the practices associated with the term “international health” changed
over the twentieth century?
7. Why has so much reproductive technology been directed at women’s bodies
rather than men’s bodies?
8. According to Warwick Anderson, tropical medicine around 1900 relied on
“essentialized race culture, more than the old notions of distinct racial
physiologies.” Discuss this claim.
9. In what ways, if at all, did plantation economies in the Atlantic world accentuate
racial difference as an important subject for modern medical theory and
practice?
10. “To create is to recombine” (François Jacob, 1977). What does this statement
tell us about twentieth-century ideas of evolution?
11. How did collecting practices in the life sciences change – or not – from the end
of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first?
12. Use two historical examples to show how model organisms have enabled and
constrained research in twentieth-century biology.