At the end of the course, the students can expect to:

- have mastered the essential theoretical and literary texts in
the area of narrative medicine

- have gained a critical understanding of clinical problems in a
humanist context

- have learned how to compensate for bias

- have developed new communication skills, both oral and 
written 

- have increased their empathy and compassionate understanding 
of others

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 who were also writers will 
be included.  A guest lecture by a medical doctor will be part 
of every semester's teaching. 

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"