Humanism and the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston

This course connects today’s medical humanities to the tradition of Renaissance humanism and traces the history of medical humanities from its inception in the 1960s to the present day. Major topic include: modernity and its implications for both medicine and medical humanities; challenges to modernity and positivism from both continental and analytic philosophical traditions; relations between medical humanities and the social sciences; origins, development, and appropriate scope of bioethics; literature and medicine and narrative approaches to ethics and medicine; religious themes in bioethics and humanities; feminist theories relevant to humanities and bioethics; the debate over principlism vs. moral particularism in ethics; and medical humanities conceived as dialogical practice. Two books, Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis and David Rothman’s Strangers at the Bedside, and readings by authors such as Bouwsma, Taylor, Gadamer, Geertz, Carson, Ramsey, Callahan, Fox, Churchill, Jones, Chambers, Jonsen, Walker, and Montgomery are assigned. The course grade is based 25% on class participation and 75% on paper assignments. Students are given options to write three separate papers or to do one short and one long paper. 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.