Medicine & Literature: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, New York University

This course introduces the student to the different ways that illness, health, and medicine are portrayed in literature by exposing the student to authors and characters that come from different cultural backgrounds. While the reading list is by no means comprehensive, it is intended to convey how the perception of medicine is dependent not only on technical scientific knowledge but also on individual experiences and social norms. By contrasting the different perspectives of medicine that each week portrays, the course will provide tools for cross-cultural understanding in a multi-cultural medical environment. This course forms part of the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities Program. It is unclear whether it can also be taken for credit as part of a professional Medicine degree. 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.