Minor in Medical Humanities (MHUM-UA)

This course introduces students to the medical humanities, an emerging field that uses the methods of humanistic inquiry to explore and challenge discourses of medicine, health, and medical science. What is a human being? How do we know when a body is healthy? How should we treat disease and injury? How are questions of individual well-being, public health and medical treatment affected by gender, race, and class? Over the course of the semester, we will examine the overlap between medical and humanistic knowledge by reading various forms of writing and rhetoric that attempt to come to terms with these questions, from Platonic dialogues about poetry and writing to colonial debates about smallpox inoculation, from Victorian medical case histories to modern prescription pads. What do we know about humans and human bodies? How do we know what we know? And how do we talk or write about this knowledge and its application?

How have writers, scientists, artists, philosophers, musicians, performers, playwrights, and citizens responded to the outbreak of infectious disease across the centuries and around the world? What kinds of stories, narratives, and archives have shaped artistic, medical, and governmental responses? This course uses humanistic inquiry to engage with pandemics and plagues. Our case studies include bubonic plague, tuberculosis, cholera, malaria, 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19. The course will engage a rich array of materials and approaches by focusing on themes such as historical plagues, plagues in literature, the impact of race, gender, and class on pandemic responses, war and pandemics, plus theatrical, film, and visual representations of disease.