Narratives of Medical Catastrophes, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston

This course will examine historical, autobiographical, fictional, and video narratives of past, present, and potential medical catastrophes—defined as devastating circumstances that result in the total collapse of medical institutions and infrastructure for a prolonged period of time. The first part of the course will take a panoramic overview of historical narratives of medical catastrophes from the plagues in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and the seventeenth-century England; the 1918 influenza pandemic, especially in the United States; to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. The middle section of the course will zoom in for a close and extended examination of narratives from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, with special attention to the events at Memorial Medical Center. The focus of the final part of the course will expand to consider narratives of contemporary and potential medical catastrophes, from the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Japan to the current outbreak of Ebola and potential pandemics of avian influenza. Ethical issues emerging from these various narratives will be a continuing theme throughout the course. Students’ grades will be determined by the quality of their participation in class discuss (20%); two short essays (20% each); and a final course paper (40%). 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.