Medicine, Culture, And You

In the last century or so, advances in medical science and technology have significantly altered both the material world and inner worlds, including the images people have of themselves and of what it means to be human more generally. This course is designed to explore these things and to develop a critical understanding of the relations between medicine, individual selfhood, and culture more generally. The major activity of the seminar will be reading, discussing, and writing about works by doctors, patients, and others who were interested in the personal and cultural aspects of medicine.

Discussions will move between the concrete situations presented in the readings and the personal, social, and ethical questions these experiences raise for patients, medical professionals, and citizens of the 21st century. Some likely areas of discussion: the relation between medicine and culture, the personal and social meanings of illness and healing, varieties of patient-physician relationships, and patients' and physicians' rights and responsibilities.

These are not simple topics, and in discussing them students will look not so much for final answers (about which there is room for intelligent people to disagree) as for an informed and useful sense of what such discussion involves and of how humanities texts and critical ideas can contribute to it. The class will spend a good deal of time on writing, on the nature and structure of stories, and on the process of interpretation.