Course Description
Issues of immediate interest to future doctors and psychologists and to anyone concerned with the role of medicine in modern life: empathy, illness, suffering, death, dialogue, relationships, and the power of the human story. The medium is literature and art, but the aim is interdisciplinary: a way to reinsert humanist understanding into a primarily scientific worldview.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
The syllabus will include an expanded reading list for graduate
students in the course, with three additional secondary sources
(critical theory and interdisciplinary criticism). The final
paper for graduate students will be a comparative research paper
of 15 pages and will obligatorily include a position
perspective, requiring the student to define their theoretical
stance. Each graduate student will also give a 15 minute oral
presentation in class on a topic related to the course.
Athena Title
Literature and Medicine
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
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
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 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"
Syllabus