HMED1015W: The Value of Health: An Introduction to Health Humanities

This course introduces students to the study of Health Humanities, a field that recognizes all the ways that the achievement of health and the practice of medicine are deeply rooted in the human experience of culture, power, history, ethics, as well as science. By applying the methods, concepts, and content from traditional humanities disciplines, the health humanities aim to improve health care by influencing its practitioners to refine and complexify students’ judgments based on a deep and complex understanding of illness, suffering, personhood, and related issues. We will explore all the ways that health and medicine are shaped not just by the clinical encounter, but by social, political, and cultural forces that make the experience of medicine, health, and care ever more important. This course prioritizes BIG CONVERSATIONS about health, wellness, illness, care, and selfhood. It also prioritizes the need to develop effective skills of communication through in-class conversation and out-of-class writing. Additionally, this course recognizes the relationship between reading, searching for and interpreting evidence, and the clinical skills of diagnosis, patient advocacy, and humane medicine. In order to achieve these aims, we will be writing about the readings in formal and informal ways, always with an eye toward how we see agency, power, and humanity at work in the representation of medicine, illness, and health.

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