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 2800H
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will become familiar with various aspects of medical care and public health today, and to make the medical world in general more accessible.
Topical Outline
The course is structured around the following topics: philosophical approaches to illness and suffering; the analogies between story-telling and diagnostic procedures; physicians as both specialists and humanists; and the resources that literature offers in handling the ethical issues of disease and medical treatment.
Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Live
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
Gillian Rose, Love’s Work
Atul Gawande, Complications
Lisa Sanders, Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
