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Health and Healing: Writing the Medical Humanities

Become a Summer Trojan and earn college credit.

When we think of modern medicine, we often picture cutting-edge laboratories and hospitals — places where medical researchers, biotech experts and doctors collaborate to understand and cure disease. But the human side of the healing arts is just as fascinating. Medical care systems are also living, evolving practices grounded in specific cultural, religious, historical and social contexts. If you are interested in pursuing medicine or a related field, this reading- and writing-focused approach to the medical humanities is for you.

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Program Overview

This course explores how the healing arts have evolved over time — from being entwined with religion and magic in pre-modern Europe to the Scientific Revolution to the modern Western model of evidence-based medicine.

We will also interrogate how modern medicine thinks about the interaction between our individual bodies and the environment, as well as larger social and cultural communities.

We’ll seek to answer how the modern medical establishment thinks about the connection between mind and body when talking about illness.

Students will emerge from this course more knowledgeable about the history of medicine and with experience writing about their own personal connection to basic human questions about health and healing.

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Key Information

Topics of Study

History of Western medicine
How medical knowledge and practice became “professionalized”
Debates about what kinds of knowledge “count” in medical education
Shifting philosophical ideas about the human body and its relationship to the environment, including the rise of epidemiology and the structural determinants of health
Narrative medicine and the distinction between disease (the objective, physical cause of sickness) and illness (a patient’s subjective, lived experience of the disease)
Narrative nonfiction writing

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Learning Highlights

Think critically about medicine as a historically evolving and culturally mediated human practice
Narrow down a research topic and use the library’s databases to find, assess and incorporate research into a compelling narrative argument
Reflect on and write compellingly about your lived, “subjective” experience alongside the “objective” topic you are studying
Clearly articulate your passion and commitment to a career in healing

Requirements

Students must bring their own laptops

Week	Focus	Key Topics	Assignments and Activities
1	The History of Medicine	The evolution of early medicine from a branch of magic and religion to evidence-based science in the 19th and 20th centuries	Field trip to The Huntington library and gardens, with a lecture and tour by a historian and curator.
2	Medical Anthropology	Understanding health from environmental, social and systems perspectives	Guest lecture from USC Brain and Creativity Institute professor.
3	Narrative Medicine	Understanding the difference between disease (a biological state) and illness (the lived, internal experience of being sick)	Guest lecture from Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine doctor.
4	Writing the Researched Personal Essay	Learning how to integrate personal anecdote into research to create compelling narratives	Guest speaker from the USC Narrative Medicine program.

[My favorite field trip was to] the Huntington Library … not only did I see a lot of manuscripts regarding the history of medicine, I also enjoyed the beautiful view at the garden.

— USC Summer Programs student participant