Caring for the Poor: Poverty, Health Care, and the Novel

Catalog description

In his landmark Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that the best way to understand historical income- and wealth-inequality is to look to the novels of Austen, Balzac, and Dickens. But what about the intersection of inequality and medical care? While we know that the intersection of poverty and medical care is undeniable, what can we learn about today's healthcare inequalities by exploring the relationship between poverty and medicine in literature? This course explores those questions by situating medical history in a broader context of literature, economics, and public health. P: Ethics; Contemporary Composition; Critical Issues in Human Inquiry.