Seminars in Medical Humanities and Applied Arts: Medicine and the Short Story, Northwestern University (Feinberg)

The Seminars in Medical Humanities and Applied Arts are a required component of the curriculum taken by all medical students. Every medical student takes one seminar selected from a listing of 15 - 20 seminars the first year of medical school, and another one in the second year. Each seminar is 10 contact hours (5 weeks x 5 2-hour class sessions) = total of 20 humanities/arts contact hours in the 4-year medical curriculum (a fourth-year humanities elective is also an option). There are between 8 and 12 students in each seminar. They are taught by instructors with humanities/arts expertise, usually PhD or MFA credentials, depending on the discipline, sometimes in collaboration with MD or other clinical faculty. Not all seminars include literary texts directly, although many do. Many focus explicitly on literary studies as the central discipline (e.g. Medicine and the short story; Speculative fiction and bioethics; doctors on film; reproduction on TV; anatomy in history and fiction; graphic medicine: reading and making comics; etc). Others involve writing as well as reading poetry; visual arts; theater / improv; magic and healing; etc. Northwestern also offers an MA in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. 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.