Chasing Connection: A Survey of the Medical Humanities, Brown University (Alpert)

As an introduction to the medical humanities, this course will push students to discover connections between the humanities, arts, and medicine. The majority of the course meetings will be seminars run by our guest speakers including Comparative Literature professor Arnold Weinstein, oral historian Caroline Cunfer, and physician author Jay Baruch. Each seminar will explore a different aspect of the medical humanities, including literature that deals with medical topics, writing medical narratives, and the depiction of disease and treatment in art and photography. The course will include field trips to the RISD museum and a dance class for patients with Parkinson's. The seminars are designed to give students the theory and technical skills needed to design a final project which will be showcased in an exhibit open to members from all areas of the Brown, PLME, and AMS community. This is a pre-clerkship elective open to first- and second-year medical students. It is designed, implemented and led by students along with a faculty advisor. This ½ credit elective is graded Satisfactory/No Credit. Although listed on the student's official transcript, it does not count toward fulfilling the requirements of the MD degree. The Clinical Arts and Humanities Program at Brown University (Alpert) also appears to offer relevant courses and seminars that use literature, but it is unclear whether all of these courses and seminars continue to run. For more information, see https://www.brown.edu/academics/medical/education/other-programs/clinical-arts-humanities/courses-and-seminars. This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.