Lit and Culture: Literature and Medicine

Catalog description

This is an interdisciplinary course exploring the intersection of medicine and literature, seeking to understand our perceptions of disease as a cultural phenomenon. The course is designed to explore the cultural dynamic of our experience of disease, and the mechanisms, both metaphorical and imaginative with which human beings ascribe significance to affliction. These meanings have been set out most fully in David Morriss The Culture of Pain, a prize-winning essay that will serve as the central text in the course. We will begin, however, with a brisk history of medicine outlined in Roy Porters Blood and Guts. Other readings include short stories that focus on the experience of illness as it has been articulated by modern writers. Although this course will have a particular relevance for students interested in a variety of health-care fields, all students are welcome. The course will focus not on the practice of medicine as a form of science, but on medicine as one of the human arts. We will pay particular attention to the experience of illness from the standpoint of those who have actually been ill. The course argues, what has been a received opinion in other circles for some time, that our experience of illness, like our experience of weight, beauty, or age, is in some measure social constructed.