The Cause is Uncertain

While virtually every death certificate lists a cause of death, what actually caused that death to occur is an unexpectedly more complex question. This course will focus specifically on causality claims about health and interrogate the methods used to support such claims. At the same time, by focusing on causality claims about health issues, from cholera to breast cancer and AIDS--the course asks how we might come to useful causal knowledge in the absence of being able to perform those manipulations that have been the hallmark of experimental science.