Medical Humanities

Syllabi: Medicine in Literature

INSTITUTION: Westmont College

INSTRUCTOR: Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Ph.D. (email: mcentyre@westmont.edu)

ENROLLMENT: undergraduates; elective

SEMESTER: Spring 1999

COURSE OBJECTIVES: Some General Questions to be Addressed in this Course

What are some of the fundamental cultural assumptions about health, illness, healing, and death that have helped to shape American medicine?

How are healing and storytelling related in this culture?

How has medicine in this century been politicized and what impact has medical politics had on public attitudes toward specific illnesses and public policy regarding disease and treatment?

How are the politics of gender played out in the medical arena?

What drives people in pain or near death to seek creative modes of expression? What are some of the problems in finding a language for pain? What makes poems a particularly suitable vehicle for such efforts?

What difference does it make what metaphors we use when we speak of illness and healing? What legitimacy is there in the idea of "illness as metaphor"?

How are "literary" conventions operative in clinical dialogue? In case histories? In scientific writing? How do those conventions shape the information we give and receive about disease, illness, and pain?

What do our popular images and literary representations of doctors, nurses, and sick people reflect about the assumptions we make about illness? About medical authority? Privacy? Personal rights? The body-mind relation?

Discussion in the course will focus on narrative as a mode of ethical reasoning, awareness of the dynamics of language and story as an aid to more effective clinical dialogue, conceptual, cultural and political issues in medicine, and the role of imagination in illness and healing.

COURSEWORK:

Active participation in class discussion

Response paper due every other Thursday

Quizzes or in-class exercises on alternate Thursdays

Book Review

Midterm and final exams SCHEDULE OF READINGS:

Jan 12	Introduction: Medicine and Culture
	Doctors and Patients: The Clinical Encounter
	Bible excerpts R 22-23
	Hemingway, "Indian Camp," R 139-142
	Selzer, "Mercy," "Imelda" R 275-290
Jan 19	Maugham, "The Summing Up," R 66-71
	Williams, "The Practice," R 72-77
	Klass, "Invasions," R 399-402
Jan 26	Chekhov, "A Doctor's Visit," R 53-63
	Williams, "The Girl with a Pimply Face," "Use of Force," R 82-95
Feb 2	Pym, "A Few Green Leaves," R 196-200
	Hilfiker, "Mistakes," R 376-387
	Williams, poems, R 72-82
Feb 9	Movie: "The Doctor"; Movie: "Awakenings"
	Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (first half)
Feb 16	Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (second half)
Feb 23	Hawkins and Ballard, Time to Go
Mar 2	Plagues, Epidemics and Public Health
	McEntyre, "Epidemics as Epic Subjects"; plague writings
Mar 9	Camus, The Plague
Mar 16	Feldschuh, Miss Evers' Boys
Mar 23	Preston, The Hot Zone
Mar 29	SPRING BREAK
Apr 6	Poetry and Pain
	McEntyre, "Poetry and Pain"; Reprints from Arts & Medicine
Apr 13	Frost, 64; Auden, 168-172; Miles, 187; Lowbury, 201; Thomas, 215
Apr 20	Abse, 248-250; Dickey, 251-255; M. Williams, 317-318; Goedicke, 319
Apr 27	Levertov, 256-258; Pastan, 328-331; Stone, 347-351; Clifton, 352; Mukand, 403

BOOK REVIEW FORMAT:

Data: Author's background, publication date, any other relevant contextual information (i.e., was this written as a response to a particular controversy, after a diagnosis or life crisis, during med school, etc.)
Briefly summarize the main points of the story or argument.
In what ways does this book contribute to our understanding of the social, political, psychological, religious, or cultural dimensions of medicine?
What are two or three of the most surprising, illuminating, problematic, or disturbing points in the argument or story? Why?
Who might benefit from reading this book? How?
To what other works might you compare or contrast this book?
Cite a brief representative passage and discuss noteworthy aspects of the writer's style.