SMHU 4000: Seminar in Medical Humanities
Subtitle: “Literature and Medicine: Writing about Illness”
Emily Dickinson once wrote that “Infection in the sentence breeds.” Diseases are stories. They have characters—patient zero and the asymptomatic carrier, for example—and illnesses are a call for stories. Diseases have conflict, crisis, and resolution in the form of infection, spread, panic, treatment, and restoration. They are comedies and tragedies; they are poetry and prose. Through readings of medical narratives, from memoir and essay to poetry and prose, this course will explore narratives of disease and illness while sharpening our analytical and interpretative skills. We'll read works by writers who reflected on their own illnesses, such as Harold Pinter and Sylvia Plath, and doctors who became writers, such as Paul Kalanithi in When Breath Becomes Air, which chronicles his diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer at age 36, when he was at the end of his training to become a neurosurgeon. Medical Humanities is a recent movement that emphasizes an empathetic and humanistic treatment of disease and illness, and this interdisciplinary course offers students an avenue by which to explore these issues.
