Introduction to the interdisciplinary and wide-ranging field of health humanities, its subjects and scope, and the ways it can expand and enrich the experiences of patients and practitioners. This course teaches students how we differentiate and interrelate the disciplines that inform our understanding of healthcare as a system and human health as both communal and individual. The course focuses on how humanities disciplines can contribute to better health outcomes for individuals, communities, and those working in any field of human health. Foundational theories and critiques are introduced, such as how differentiated disciplinary knowledge (anatomy, chemistry, molecular biology) tends to atomize human experience into de-humanized parts, and how humanities disciplinary knowledge can bridge the body as an object of study with the diversity of human experience.

This course introduces students to professions within the US healthcare system, including the historical, systemic, political, and structural influences that shaped the culture of these professions. This includes professional norms, values, and traditions as well as popular perceptions of the roles of the various professions within the United States healthcare system. Students learn how to analyze and contextualize various kinds of practices and behaviors that occur within health systems, professions, and between health professionals. Students develop skills necessary to navigate the cultural differences by health professions and to demonstrate competence when interacting within healthcare culture.

Critical inquiry is the process of gathering and evaluating information, ideas, and assumptions from multiple perspectives to produce well-reasoned analysis and understanding, and leading to new ideas, applications and questions. This course is intended to introduce new students to intellectual inquiry at the university by engaging them in in-depth study of a single topic utilizing a variety of perspectives and methods. The course emphasizes the essential role of critical and creative thinking to their lives as students, citizens, future professionals, and productive members of their communities.

Critical inquiry is the process of gathering and evaluating information, ideas, and assumptions from multiple perspectives to produce well-reasoned analysis and understanding, and leading to new ideas, applications and questions. This course is intended to introduce new students to intellectual inquiry at the university by engaging them in in-depth study of a single topic utilizing a variety of perspectives and methods. The course emphasizes the essential role of critical and creative thinking to their lives as students, citizens, future professionals, and productive members of their communities. The lab for the course is an interdisciplinary application lab, wherein students work in teams to demonstrate what they learned in the didactic portion of the course through the creation of a project, presentation, art object/installation, play, podcast, short film, co-authored reflection (debrief) on a simulation experience, etc. Faculty who design the didactic portion of the course together will design this portion as a 5-week experiential component of the course, which might include community partnerships or field trips. Students who take the course and lab will be invited to display their project results in a one-afternoon presentation at the end of each semester (to be arranged by college events personnel).

This course surveys the practice of narrative medicine, focusing in particular on foundational skills of close reading and reflective writing. Drawing on literary theory and literary texts, students will engage with a variety of genres, perspectives, and narrative approaches to better understand and work with stories as a necessary precondition for interpersonal ethicality. Topics will include frame, form, time, plot, and desire.

In this course students explore the ways different societies interpret health, illness, and healing throughout history. Students will learn how these interpretations change over time through the analysis of primary source texts. By studying healthcare through the lens of history, students will better understand that perceptions of health and illness are reflective of specific cultural and social contexts.

This is a variable topic seminar that deals with selected humanities themes as announced when the course is offered.

In this course, students work with a faculty mentor to apply knowledge and skills developed in previous coursework to student selected research questions and practical issues at the intersection of healthcare and the humanities. Students learn research methods and apply them to projects that explore the ways individuals and societies interpret and make sense of the body, illness, health, and the wide variety of experiences and emotions connected to them.

The Health Humanities internship is a variable credit (3-9 hours) internship that encourages juniors/seniors to investigate a career through a placement in a professional setting or in development of future projects leading to graduate study or other research placements. This allows students to work under the guidance of an immediate supervisor and/or a college faculty sponsor. The internship is 50 hours per credit. A 3-credit internship thus requires 150 hours in the placement, or roughly 10 hours per week through a 15-week semester.

Course transfers in as a humanities core elective.