Medical Humanities and Clinical Practice, University of Florida

This course is designed as an introduction to the physical realities of patient care and to the way in which medical humanities illuminate understanding of the practice of medicine. The patient care portion of the course will orient students to the fundamentals of the clinical patient encounter. This portion will include a broad, general overview of the art of history taking and the physical exam. To parallel our discussions on the clinical patient encounter, we will have discussions on various aspects of the medical humanities, including the history of medicine, literature and medicine, medical ethics, movies, and arts and medicine. We will use these humanities to gain increased perspective on and understanding of the doctor-patient relationship, the art of listening, visual observation, ethical principles, and more. Throughout this course students will critically reflect on discussion topics, and develop a greater understanding of their individual values, beliefs, and attitudes. This course forms part of the Medical Humanities Track of the MD Program at the University of Florida. For more information, see https://discovery.education.med.ufl.edu/discovery-tracks/medical-humanities/. 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.