Learning Outcomes

Medical Humanities Minor students will learn to appreciate the body and medical issues from multiple disciplinary and aesthetic perspectives. For example, we hope that students will understand epidemics from epidemiological data and through literature, painting, performance, history, culture, politics, sociology, and policy. A critical insight provided by Medical Humanities is that your disciplinary approach shapes your conclusions significantly; multiple methods thus help us get closer to the complexity of the natural world and living life.

We expect that in any topic that becomes of great interest to them, students will reach across the two cultures of science (medicine in particular) and the humanities, and hold an awareness of each. We anticipate that those students who go on to medical school will remain engaged with the arts and humanities in that pursuit and that those who go on to other endeavors, be they more humanistic, sociological, political, or otherwise scientific, will retain an understanding of how medicine and medical issues are present in their domain.

The goals of the minor are:

To learn how the different disciplines that make Medical Humanities differ as disciplines and how they can effectively collaborate to address significant issues in today’s world
To experience critical thinking, research, evaluation, and presentation skills as expressed in more than one discipline
To learn how an interdisciplinary approach can promote reflection and self-understanding about the health of the body and the mind from multiple perspectives
To cultivate a clear connection to contemporary issues of students’ choosing in the Medical Humanities area