PhD students of history of medicine

Characteristics of the study programme
History of medicine is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the history of medical science, history of particular specialties and their representatives, history of the medical profession and development of medical thought, history of training of health professionals, history of public health and health care facilities, incidence and alterations of disease entities as well as their treatment. At medical schools of universities in the world, history of medicine has had century-lasting tradition. The Institute for History of Medicine and Foreign Languages (thereinafter “Institute”) of Charles University – the First Faculty of Medicine, one of the first in Europe, has been active at the oldest medical faculty in Czechia since 1920. Studies in this programme enable graduates of faculties of medicine and natural science as well as of various humanitarian fields to achieve the highest specialized education in this discipline. The Institute, which is the only in this specialty, is the central co-ordinating institution for education of PhD students of history of medicine for other university schools in Prague and nationwide

Profile of the graduate in the discipline
Graduates in the discipline must be able to work with scientific literature in foreign languages, independently prepare and implement research projects and elaborate them considering their interdisciplinary nature above all. Further, they must be able to solve problems of topics allotted in the fields of paleopathology, paleomicrobiology, gender and social history, history of medicine and health care, typology and development of medical literature written in Latin and concerning the medical faculty in Prague, etc.

Study obligations:
The subjects are divided into obligatory and elective. Each student has to pass at least three subjects (two obligatory and one podmíněně povinný).

Obligatory subjects:
B90131 Lectures in the history of medicine
B91967 Seminar in History of Medicine

Elective subjects (each student has to pass at least one):
B90127 Methodology of Historical Sciences (compusory only for science and biomedical graduates)
B90126 Somatology (compulsory only for humanities graduates)
Part of the study plan is an English language exam.

The requisites to the commencement of the defence are: fulfillment of all the study obligations, creative and placement activities and the state doctoral examination.

Requirements on creative activities:
The student has to publish at least one partial result in the form of article or monography during the study. In the case of article, the journal must belong to one of the following categories:
• journal listed in the databases WoS, SCOPUS.
• journal listed in the databases ERIH+.
• journal listed in the current list of peer-reviewed journal without an impact factor in the Czech Republic
(https://www.vyzkum.cz/FrontClanek.aspx?idsekce=733439).

The student must be first author of the article, in case of historical articles the single author.

Other required creative activity:
• review and assessement activities (at least two reviews during the study).
• presentation on two conferences during the period of studies

Requirements on placement taken:
Students are obliged to work in foreign archives, the length of their stay depends on the research topic. The fulfillment of this requirement will be reflected in the sources of the dissertation and should be confirmed by the supervisor. For those students working on paleopathological or archaeological topics, a one-month long internship at a corresponding profesional workplace or a field work on a project abroad is recognized as a placement.

State docoral examination:
Requisites for the state doctoral examination:
• the student must receive credit for both the obligatory subjects and one elective subject
• the student must pass and English language exam.

The student should demonstrate an advanced level of general knowledge in the field, such as:
• detailed medical, health, social and historical knowledge related to the period related to the topic of the dissertation.
• answer a question concerning the general history of medicine, both Czech and foreign, from a different time period than the one related to the topic of dissertation.
• theoretical and methodological knowledge of both history of medicine as well as the history of the field of history of medicine.

The literature for the state doctoral examination will be continuously updated and supplemented depending on the topic of the dissertation.

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