Fall 2025 Theme: Animals and Monsters in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Description: This course examines the development of ethical attitudes and concepts that influenced medicine and science in antiquity and their relationship to modern bioethical issues impacting various STEM fields. Focusing on Greek and Roman sources, we will investigate the cultural, historical, and intellectual factors that shaped ideas about bioethics in antiquity, and how those ideas have been transmitted across cultures and time periods. Ethical issues to be discussed include the development of medical and scientific oaths, doctor-patient confidentiality, dissection and animal experimentation, pain management and palliative care, abortion, quarantine and other epidemiological responses to pandemics, biological and chemical warfare, attitudes toward disability, and healthcare access, accessibility, and equity. With each ethical issue, we will discuss both the insights and the limits to what the ancient perspectives can offer for present-day bioethical concerns, and how medicine and the sciences have evolved since antiquity or may still need to evolve.
Course Description
Critical approach to the study of ancient Mediterranean languages, literatures, histories, and material cultures. CAMS 83Y First-Year Seminar in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (3 credits) (GH;FYS;IL;Y) meets the (BA) Bachelor of Arts degree requirements and satisfies the (Y) Writing Across the Curriculum requirement in International Cultures. The first-year seminar in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS) is concerned with selected features of one or more of the cultures that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea in antiquity, from around 3,500 B.C. to 500 A.D. The topic of CAMS first-year seminars varies. In all offerings of this course students will be introduced to the civilizations that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea in ancient times and why their great accomplishments, their struggles, and their failures remain important to us even today. Students will learn about ancient literature and physical remains that provide information about these cultures. Students will learn to assess theories about ancient societies, the types of evidence that exist for antiquity, and how to gain access to academic resources in the library and in electronic form. Some recent seminar topics include a critical study of widely believed ” Ancient Mysteries,” such as the continent of Atlantis and Pyramid Power; a seminar on “Greek Gods in Action,” investigating how the Greeks believed that the gods influenced them and might even live among them; a seminar on the relationships among Christians, Jews, and Pagans in the later Roman period; and “Word Power,” a course that gives students linguistic tools to understand the sources and nature of much of our modern English vocabulary. Students will read selections of ancient literature in English translation and examine the remains of the societies that produced them to ponder basic questions about the meaning and value of human life. Some knowledge of ancient Mediterranean cultures has always been indispensable to intelligent participation in contemporary society. By examining selected topics in a seminar format, students learn how scholarship advances in in an academic environment while also learning how features of ancient languages, and religious, political, and social ideas formulated in antiquity give insights into our own culture and into the common humanity that all people share.
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