Frida Kahlo’s 1939 oil painting The Two Fridas
HONR 300: Honors Scholar Seminar: Medical Humanities - Spring 2021
How do we narrate the experiences of disease, pain, illness, and recovery? What happens when different cultural understandings of disease conflict with one another? How do accounts of historic global diseases influence our understanding of current ones? How do we create meaning out of pain and suffering? Medical Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand how illness and disease affects us and the world in which we live and work. It merges the study of medicine with literature, history, culture, sociology, ethics, philosophy, and the arts to answer such questions as these. In this course we will explore the intersections of medicine and the humanities to address crucial questions about health and well-being.
Specific Course Goals
· Improve and refine close-reading and analytical skills
· Increase and improve knowledge of medical humanities as interdisciplinary field
· Improve and refine research skills as they pertain to medical humanities
· Improve and refine your ability to identify the conventions of genres and mediums (nonfiction, poetry, short story, novel, critical articles, film, etc.,) as they pertain to medical humanities
· Improve knowledge of major movements and subgenres within the medical humanities field
