Opera and Disease, Cooper Medical School of Rowan University

Opera is musical drama and provides a heightened sense of emotion through the nonverbal (both in acting, in staging, and of course in the music itself) and verbal (the libretto and the music). Music and socio-cultural analysis are possible because of a dynamic relationship which Lawrence Kramer calls a "network of social, intellectual, and material conditions that strongly, though often implicitly, affect meaning." While it is embedded in the cultural context of their time, Western operas have explored much of what is essential to the human condition, desires, needs, anxieties, fears, disease, and death. Understanding the depths of the human condition and all of its complexity cannot be reached through a unilateral approach. However, adopting a multimodal approach, such as that offered by opera with its visual and aural sides, brings us closer to this understanding. This is not a simple assertion of music's ineffable power to move the emotions or, on the other hand, a technically advanced theory available only to musicologists. Rather, the course seeks to combine medical and cultural history with literary and dramatic analysis. Just as the barriers separating the different arms of the sciences have begun to dissolve, so to should the divide between science and humanities, the one used to compliment the other. We will explore the portrayal and use of disease and death in five operas as well as the various portrayals of the physician in opera. This course requires student attendance at one live opera. Selective only. Selectives in the Medical Humanities consist of semester-long experiences in which students are able to explore various course offerings relating the humanities to the practice of medicine. Individual Selectives courses meet six times per semester and sessions are designed to be interactive in nature. Students are required to take two Selectives courses during Phase 1. These courses are designed to enrich the educational experience and provide a more well-rounded background to medical students, balancing the art and the science of medicine. 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.