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| Course ID: | CMLT 2800. 3 hours. | | Course Title: | Literature and Medicine | Course
Description: | Issues that medical professionals encounter in their daily
practice: empathy, illness, suffering, death, dialogue,
relationships, and the power of the human story. Through the
reading and interpretation of literary texts--skills akin to
diagnosis--students learn the value of humanistic understanding
in a field traditionally defined as exclusively scientific. | | Oasis Title: | Literature and Medicine | | Duplicate Credit: | Not open to students with credit in CMLT 2810H | Semester Course
Offered: | Offered every year. | | Grading System: | A-F (Traditional) |
| | Course Objectives: | The course will focus student attention on medical and ethical
issues in literature and art. Readings and written assignments
will allow students to address the human experience of being a
patient and a doctor as that experience has been represented in
literature. Students will acquire an appreciation of the human
dynamic of clinical situations and an understanding that
supplements scientific knowledge. | | Topical Outline: | The course will be structured around the following core topics:
empathy, disease, suffering, death and mourning, madness, the
body, aging, healing, dialogue, relationship. The materials
will include multicultural literary, critical, and
philosophical texts, and selected films and paintings. Short
stories and poems written by doctors will be included.
Sample reading list:
Martin Buber: "I and Thou"
Ingmar Bergman: "Persona"
Albert Camus: "The Plague"
Anton Chekhov: "Collected Stories"
Sigmund Freud: "Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis"
Marguerite Duras: "The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "The Sorrows of Young Werther"
Janusz Korczak: "Ghetto Diary"
Sylvia Plath: "The Bell Jar"
Marcel Proust: "Swann's Love"
Susan Sontag: "Illness as Metaphor"
Arnold Weinsten: "Recovering Your Story" and "A Scream Goes
Through the House" | |
Syllabus:
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