Instructor: Victor Braitberg
Tues & Thurs | 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM | In-person
This course examines medicine and policing as two institutions that touch society where it hurts most—responding to illness, injury, addiction, conflict, and behaviors deemed disruptive or dangerous. Both are charged with restoring order, and both exercise forms of authority over people’s bodies, lives, and choices. Through comparative historical and social analysis, we will explore how hospitals and prisons emerged as parallel systems for managing disorder, and how professional interventions—whether medical or legal—help define what counts as normal, deviant, healthy, or criminal. Drawing on medical history, philosophy, sociology, criminology, and anthropology, the course considers how race, class, and institutional power shape who receives care, who is subjected to control, and who is excluded altogether. Through class discussions, role playing, essay writing, and out of classroom research, students will gain critical tools for analyzing the relationship between care, control, and the production of social order.