MED 32 — Pandemics and Human History
Quarter: Winter
Instructor(s): Lucy Tompkins, Julie Parsonnet
Date(s): Feb 3—Mar 3
Class Recording Available: Yes
Class Meeting Day: Tuesdays
Grade Restriction: NGR only; no credit/letter grade
Class Meeting Time: 5:30—7:00 pm (PT)
Tuition: $330
Refund Deadline: Feb 5
Unit(s): 0
Status: Open
Quarter: Winter
Day: Tuesdays
Duration: 5 weeks
Time: 5:30—7:00 pm (PT)
Date(s): Feb 3—Mar 3
Unit(s): 0
Tuition: $330
Refund Deadline: Feb 5
Instructor(s): Lucy Tompkins, Julie Parsonnet
Grade Restriction: NGR only; no credit/letter grade
Recording Available: Yes
Status: Open
Epidemics have long reshaped human history, from the Plagues of Egypt to Covid, but they have also spurred extraordinary advances in science and medicine. Each encounter with a deadly pathogen has deepened our understanding of biology, inspired innovations in public health, and revealed the resilience of human societies. Led by two Stanford Medicine professors, this course explores five transformative diseases—plague, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, and tuberculosis—and how they redirected both history and medicine. Students will investigate the biology of these pathogens alongside the breakthroughs and setbacks in their control, uncovering their wide-ranging social and political impact. By pairing historical case studies with modern pandemics, including HIV and Covid, we’ll trace enduring lessons and emerging possibilities.
LUCY TOMPKINS
Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Emerita (Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine), Stanford Medicine
Lucy Tompkins’s research encompasses both laboratory-based bacterial pathogenesis and the molecular epidemiology of infectious disease outbreaks. Over her career, she has held multiple national leadership positions and editorships. At Stanford, she served as director of clinical microbiology, hospital epidemiologist, medical director of the Infection Prevention and Control Department at Stanford Health Care, division chief, and associate dean for faculty affairs, among other roles. JULIE PARSONNET
George DeForest Barnett Professor of Medicine and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford Medicine
Julie Parsonnet's research has focused on the role of infections in chronic disease. Her group was pivotal in establishing a bacterial cause of gastric cancer and gastric lymphoma and on showing a decrease in human body temperature over the last 150 years. She studies the effects of climate change on the incidence of infections in California and the uses of wastewater for surveillance of infectious diseases. Before Stanford, she was an epidemic intelligence service officer with the CDC. At Stanford, she teaches about infectious diseases epidemiology and outbreak investigation and about how pandemics have changed world history. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Textbooks for this course:
(Optional) Mitchell L. Hammond, Epidemics and the Modern World (ISBN 978-1487593735)