GR6050: Graduate Symposium in Medical Humanities | A. Hegele, R. Charon

English and Comparative Literature
Graduate Seminar
Tu 6:10-8PM

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, write to the course instructors with a statement of interest.

Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links.