Literature, Medicine, and Culture 2.5 Credits/Maximum of 2.5

Catalog description

Literature, Medicine, and Culture provides students with an opportunity to consider contemporary medicine and treatment in relation to historical experiences, ideas, and imagination. Course readings explicitly pose questions about the present in relation to the past, the challenges of modern therapeutics and how they affect enduring ideas about human nature, and the experience of illness from the patient perspective. Students will build on their Humanities and Systems knowledge base concerning the cultural contexts of illness, treatment, and care. Course content varies according to instructor expertise and topic selection. Students who complete the course will increase their knowledge about medical history and the patient experience, imaginative portrayals of illness and health, and societal approaches to disease and disability. They will be able to identify rhetorical features of disease narratives and historically consistent elements of human experience of illness. In addition, students will enhance skills in reading, interpretation, and analytic writing, as well as observational skills. Classroom discussion and informal assignments help students develop sophisticated understanding of medicine and human experience in context, training them to think critically and in complex ways about the human experience of health and illness, and to represent their developing ideas in written assignments and/or creative projects. Other elements of health humanities learning, such as consideration of professional identity formation and ethics, may be included in course content.