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Course Information

Description

How can health care systems be restructured to provide high quality care even to the poorest and most vulnerable people on our planet?

Health care is never just about medicine. It is about people. It is about those pushed to the margins, whose lives are ground down by poverty, trapped by unjust systems, and devalued by forces that declare some lives worth less than others. This course challenges students to reimagine disease, illness, and injury as biosocial phenomena—shaped as much by poverty, racism, and political violence as by pathogens. From rural Malawi to American prisons, from tuberculosis programs to the overdose crisis, we will trace the roots of global health inequities and examine the ideologies that sustain them. But this course is not only about identifying failures. It is about how we stand alongside the sick and destitute to fight for a future where health is a human right.

School Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Credits 4
Cross Reg

Available for Harvard Cross Registration

Course Component Lecture
Grading Basis FAS Letter Graded
Exam/Final Deadline Dec. 19, 2025
General Education Science and Technology in Society
Quantitative Reasoning with Data N/A
Divisional Distribution None
Course Level Primarily for Undergraduate Students