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Health and Healing: Writing the Medical Humanities

Become a Summer Trojan and earn college credit.

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. Students will learn how medical care systems are living, evolving practices grounded in specific cultural, religious, historical and social contexts.

The final project is developed across four weeks and is inspired by MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). You’ll work in teams to translate a real health issue across art, medicine and AI, culminating in a public-facing interactive exhibition and a curated digital portfolio that can be shared for college, research or creative study.

Four students walking together on a sunny day in downtown Los Angeles with City Hall visible in the background.

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

Analyze health and medicine as cultural, historical and ethical systems, not just technical practices
Distinguish disease (biological process) from illness (lived experience) and explain why both matter in care
Practice close observation, deep listening and narrative interpretation as diagnostic skills
Critically examine how AI and data tools are used in health contexts and where human judgment must remain central
Collaborate across perspectives to design a human-centered health insight or intervention
Articulate how humanities expertise contributes to real health teams and careers

Requirements

Students must bring their own laptops

Week	Focus	Key Topics	Assignments and Activities
1	Medicine as a Human System	Exploring medicine as magic, religion, ritual and performance and examining it in literature, visual art, music and dance	Field trip to The Huntington library and gardens, with a lecture and tour by a historian and curator. Sound lab. Movement lab.
2	Medical Anthropology	Understanding health from environmental, social and systems perspectives	Guest lectures from public health professional, health data scientist and bioethicist. Field trip to Cedars-Sinai Center for the Arts and Humanities in Medicine.
3	Narrative Medicine	Understanding the difference between disease (a biological state) and illness (the lived, internal experience of being sick); ancestral, integral and complementary approaches	Guest lecture from health humanities artist. Field trip to USC Health Sciences Library to work with information scientists and archivists.
4	Designing Human-Centered Health Futures	Learning how to work on Interdisciplinary teams, AI and future technologies, and future bioethics	Guest lecture from medical AI professional. Field trip to theater performance.

[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