Rhodes College (2023)
Narrative Medicine & Health Inequity
Adjunct Professor.
HLEQ 430 introduces the field of Narrative Medicine and the role of narrative in raising awareness of health inequity. Illness narratives illuminate patient experiences with social determinants of health, and clinician narratives provide insight into healthcare perspectives on inequity. Through a close study of medical narratives, we will delve into systems of health inequality, implicit bias, systemic racism and sexism, narrative ethics, death and dying, mental illness, disability, and more. Students will have the opportunity to engage with narrative medicine theory and discourse as well as to create their own forms of narrative. This course is designed for individuals interested in health equity, medicine, nursing, public health, medical anthropology, clinical psychology, other health-related fields to gain an interdisciplinary understanding and humanistic perspective of medicine through the lens of narrative.
University of Michigan (2014)
Grand Rounds: Exploring the Literary Symptoms of Illness through Narrative.
Course Instructor.
Doctors have been swearing by the Hippocratic Oath for centuries, recognizing that “there is art to medicine as well as science.” But what exactly does this entail? In this mini- course, we will immerse ourselves within the art of medicine by entering into the realm of illness narratives. How do the worlds of Literature and Medicine intertwine? This literary perspective will illuminate the experience of illness from outside the scope of science. While paying particular attention to literary genres that express the illness experience from outside the scope of science, we will also explore multiple modalities of expressing illness in music, art, and dance.
In medical education, health practitioners embark on medical rounds by discussing individual patient cases at their bedsides. This course will be structured in parallel to this approach; each week, we will explore a different aspect of medicine through the lens of a different literary genre. Through literary theory, novels, short stories, poetry, memoir, and children’s literature, we will explore abstract illness, mental illnesses like depression, physical illnesses like the locked-in syndrome, disabilities like autism, cancer, and terminal illness.
Questions to be explored include:
How do different genres of literature illuminate illness differently? What aspects of illness are made visible by some genres, overshadowed in others?
What insight do literature and other artistic mediums provide into the illness experience? What are their limitations?
Ultimately, why should we study literature from the perspective of illness narratives? How does this perspective add dimension to literary analysis, and how can it be applied to patient interactions in the medical field?