MEDHUM-MIN - Medical Humanities (Minor)
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Program Overview
Medical Humanities encompasses disciplines within the arts, humanities, medicine, and social sciences. Its goal is to allow students and scholars to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. The approach generally emphasizes the subjective experience of health and illness as captured through the expressive arts (for example, painting, music, and literature), expressed across historical periods and in different cultures, and interpreted by humanistic scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Its goal is to allow students and scholars to explore a more holistic and meaning-centered perspective on medical issues. It draws attention not only to diagnosis but to the meaning and experience of diagnosis, to the way that medicine is an art form as well as a science, and to the way institutions and culture shape how illness is identified, experienced, and treated. Its concerns range from the existential and artistic to the political and policy-oriented. The minor in Medical Humanities offers students context, tools, examples, and active involvement in research to make sense of concerns at the intersection of medicine, culture, and the arts and provide them with a way to reflect upon medical challenges.
Students will learn to appreciate the body and medical issues from multiple disciplinary and aesthetic perspectives. For example, we hope that students will understand epidemics from epidemiological data and through literature, painting, performance, history, culture, politics, sociology, and policy. A critical insight provided by Medical Humanities is that your disciplinary approach shapes your conclusions significantly; multiple methods thus help us get closer to the complexity of the natural world and living life.
We expect that in any topic that becomes of great interest to them, students will reach across the two cultures of science (medicine in particular) and the humanities, and hold an awareness of each. We anticipate that those students who go on to medical school will remain engaged with the arts and humanities in that pursuit and that those who go on to other endeavors, be they more humanistic, sociological, political, or otherwise scientific, will retain an understanding of how medicine and medical issues are present in their domain.
The goals of the minor are:
To learn how the different disciplines that make Medical Humanities differ as disciplines and how they can effectively collaborate to address significant issues in today’s world
To experience critical thinking, research, evaluation, and presentation skills as expressed in more than one discipline
To learn how an interdisciplinary approach can promote reflection and self-understanding about the health of the body and the mind from multiple perspectives
To cultivate a clear connection to contemporary issues of students’ choosing in the Medical Humanities area
Minimum Units in the Program
Minimum University Units
Requirements Overview
Students should earn a minimum of 25 units: 4 in the core course, Introduction to the Medical Humanities; 1 for participation in the workshop for at least one quarter; 20 more in at least 4 courses from at least two disciplines connected to Medical Humanities (we will provide students with a list of possible courses, though will also be open to student additions to that list) including 2 more possible units for the final presentation preparation.
20 units of additional coursework in at least 4 courses from at least two disciplines connected to Medical Humanities, including a possible 2 units for final presentation preparation.
Students should check with individual course instructors for eligibility, prerequisites, or other enrollment limitations. Students can also petition to include courses not on the list but pertinent to their project or study plan.
See the website for sample pathways.
In the final year, students will be expected to present art projects, final theses, or some other substantial project in the Medical Humanities field from one of their classes to the entire student group. They will be advised in this work either by the Medical Humanities program directors or by an appropriate faculty advisor chosen by the student.
Students will be encouraged to take a methods course in the department appropriate to their research. They will learn about a range of methods from the ANTHRO120H class but should gain a grounding in a specific method of a discipline. It is recommended that a student take a methods course different from the one offered in the discipline of their major.
We also recommend that students participate in workshops, lectures, and group discussions on Medical Humanities.