Courses

The field of medicine has been tasked with responding to a host of new ethical dilemmas, ranging from questions arising from technological advances in genomic, reproductive, and cancer care to exacerbated disparities in health justice and problems of provider burnout. Meanwhile, as a set of disciplines, the humanities face the challenge of how to write about embodied experiences (illness, pain, and healing) that resist easy verbal categorization. The interdisciplinary field of medical humanities offers both a set of methodological approaches to address such challenges and a broad umbrella under which to study the mutual influences of medico-scientific ideas and cultural/aesthetic practices. Medicine—from intimate clinical care of the individual patient to public health policymaking—has much to contribute to a humanistic understanding of how knowledge is produced and communicated, while the approaches that emerge from a historiographical or interpretive framework can enrich those coming from the physician’s black bag. Co-sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature (Morningside) and the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics (CUIMC), this innovative pilot course will offer humanists and health professionals a rare opportunity to be trained in the habits of mind of one another’s discipline, with the aim of preparing all students to teach in the medical humanities. Together, we will examine how literature, history, and philosophy make visible the experience of bodies in different stages of health and disease. We will consider how the medical humanities build on and revise earlier notions of the “medical arts” and how they attend to the historical and modern interplay between physicians, writers, and artists. Through guest lectures drawn from both humanities and medical disciplines, we will explore field-specific approaches. And through clinical witnessing at CUIMC, we will encounter the realities of caregiving. By the end of the course, students will be able to communicate to learners in the medical humanities the habits of mind of clinicians and humanities scholars; to mutually appraise positions from humanities and clinical practice; and to conjecture areas in which humanities and clinical practice are complementary. The pilot course is open to graduate students in GSAS and to health professions students and practitioners at CUIMC (MD, PhD, MPH). To apply, please write to the course instructors with a statement of interest describing your motivation for enrolling. The course is a colloquium worth 4 points of credit. Medical Clearance Prerequisites: In order to participate in clinical fieldwork at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, all students must complete HIPAA privacy training and a blood test by the beginning of the semester. Further details of these prerequisites will follow once students are admitted to the course.