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.
Athena Title
Literature and Medicine
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in CMLT 2810H
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall, spring and summer
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
Public CV