Curriculum

Students in the Advanced Certificate in Health Humanities program must complete four courses across three broad subject areas: History of Medicine, Narrative and Health, and Culture and the Body. Students have two options to complete the certificate program:

1. Take at least one course from each of the three subject areas.
2. Take MHB 412: Introduction to the Health Humanities and three other courses from any combination of subject areas.

Students will choose their courses in consultation with the program director and – if applicable – academic advisors from their own departments. 

Students may complete the certificate program at their own pace, but are strongly advised to do so within three years of admission.

 Please note that all certificate courses are held in-person at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and that some courses fall under two subject areas. 

Program Pathways

Example Course Plan A (Option #1)

• Fall Y1: MHB 412 Introduction to the Health Humanities
• Fall Y1: MHB 440: History of the Body
• Spring Y1: MHB 473: Unsafe America
• Spring Y1: MHB 430: Visual Cultures of Health and Medicine

Example Course Plan B (Option #1)

• Fall Y1: MHB 424: Literature and Medicine
• Spring Y1: MHB 426: Creative Writing in Healthcare
• Fall Y2: MHB 412: Introduction to the Health Humanities
• Spring Y2: MHB 480: The Disabled Body in Medicine and Culture

Example Course Plan C (Option #2)

• Fall Y1: MHB 440: History of the Body
• Spring Y1: MHB 421: History of Modern Medicine
• Fall Y2: MHB 420: Stories in Healthcare
• Spring Y3: MHB 432: Data, Health, and Society

Courses

MHB 412: Introduction to the Health Humanities

This course provides an introduction to the field of health humanities, which brings together perspectives from the arts, humanities, philosophy, and social sciences to enrich our understanding of health, illness, and healthcare. Students will explore the historical development of the health humanities, engage critically with major theoretical models—including the biopsychosocial framework—and examine the humanistic dimensions of healthcare practice. Emphasis is placed on the analysis of diverse forms of representation (such as narrative, visual arts, and media) and the application of a range of methodological approaches as a way of exploring different topics in health and healthcare. Through readings, discussion, and applied projects, students will develop critical thinking skills, deepen their appreciation for patient and professional perspectives, and gain tools for reflective practice in clinical, research, or community settings.

MHB 426: Creative Writing in Healthcare

The field of narrative medicine honors stories of patients, families, and clinicians. For example, illness narratives can illuminate patient perspectives, and clinician narratives can provide insight into medical training and practice. This course applies an attention to narrative to study the craft of creative writing and to practice narrative construction, with a focus on creative nonfiction. Through examination of prose, we will investigate elements that influence narrative composition and efficacy, such as structure and form, voice, tone, and more. 

Students will have the opportunity to perform close literary analysis, engage with rigorous study of narrative craft, as well as to apply this knowledge to create and revise their own forms of narrative. This course is designed for individuals interested in health, creative writing, medicine, nursing, public health, medical anthropology, clinical psychology, and other health-related or creative arts fields to gain practice in narrative construction related to health.

MHB 420: Stories in Healthcare

Medical knowledge and practice depend on both science and stories to understand the complex reality of sickness. Illness and injury call on doctor and patient to make meaning together—to narrate a story that leads, ideally, to understanding, diagnosis, and treatment. This class explores the myriad ways that stories and storytelling structure medical experience, practice, and knowledge. By applying concepts from the study of fiction, we will analyze the formal components of medical narratives to understand how stories build and express meaning. By focusing on the contexts that inform medical narratives—contexts shaped by historical configurations of culture, race, gender, class, and power (among others)—we will explore the complex web of influences that contribute to health, illness, and the success or failure of medicine. With this dual focus on contextual depth and narrative form, Stories in Healthcare aims to make students attentive and informed interpreters of stories and the patients who tell them. The course explores the ethics of telling and listening to patient stories, prompting reflection on the fundamental values informing medical care. 

After an overview of narratology—the study of narrative and its structures—the class engages with several fiction and nonfiction stories drawn from various media and genres (graphic novel, film, short story, memoir, poetry, and case reports). Through weekly reading, discussion, and frequent writing, students will develop and apply interpretive skills to texts representing diverse experiences of illness and treatment. 

MHB 421: History of Modern Medicine

Over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic, the rising cost of medical treatment, the opioid crisis, and the steady rollback of gender-affirming and reproductive health services have focused attention on the shortcomings of the U.S. healthcare system. This course positions these and other trends within the broader context of the history of modern medicine from the eighteenth century to the present. We will examine how the theory, practice, social effects, and cultural meanings of medicine have changed – and stayed the same – over time. Along these lines, we will explore sites of health and disease ranging from homes to hospitals; medical training and technologies; the intersections between medicine and science; the interactions between patients and medical practitioners; and the ways medicine has explained and contributed to unequal health outcomes. This course will introduce several important themes from the history of medicine and help you learn historical approaches to close reading, critical thinking, primary and secondary research, and writing. I look forward to working with you! 

MHB 423: Life Stories in Medicine

This course will explore the genre of biography in the history of medicine. Biography is one of the most familiar genres in medical history, long a favored format among physician-writers seeking to pay tribute to the medical profession’s “great men.” With the coalescing of the history of medicine as a professional field of study, historians have turned a critical eye to these popular hagiographies while at the same time using the genre of in new ways. This seminar will explore several questions. How has biography been used by historians to shed light on the past? What are the opportunities and limits of the genre for understanding historical forces such as contingency, personal agency, and social structure? What accounts for the genre’s popular appeal, and how has it shaped public understandings of medical practice? How is biography been used by clinicians and others to build authority, advance agendas, and construct professional identities? Can the analytic tools of biography and life writing help clinicians in writing and understanding patient charts and stories? 

MHB 424: Literature and Medicine

Literature reveals and shapes how we interact with our bodies. For example, novels such as Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper (2004) reflects how military metaphors dominate our conception of cancer, determining diagnosis as the battle that patients face. But if we were to think of cancer as a pregnancy, as author J.M. Coeztee proposes in Age of Iron (1990), this would necessitate a different relationship: if we are made pregnant by cancer, the disease becomes a biological and cultural phenomenon, even a new part of our body. With this expectant metaphor, does the disease riddled with militaristic association suddenly become hopeful, even beautiful, in its own right? This is a controversial assertion but one this class will ask you to think about.

In this seminar, we will analyze twentieth and twenty-first century literature including novels, essays, satire, and physician writing. We will map the thematic portrayals of bodies, illness/disability, patients, and clinicians through close reading of the texts’ formal features, and we will consider the implications of the past two decades’ enthusiastic uptake of literary concepts by the health professions for the purposes of enhancing clinical competencies such empathy and compassion. This class will interrogate these propositions by analyzing the role of literature in clinical and narrative medicine while also weighing the influence medicine exerts on literary form, genres, and interpretation. How might we better theorize the relationship between literature and medicine in the past century? Through weekly reading, discussion, and frequent writing, students will develop and apply interpretive skills to literary texts representing diverse experiences of illness and treatment. 

MHB 430: Visual Cultures of Health and Medicine

This course explores the ways in which art and visual culture have shaped knowledge, communication, and cultural representations of medicine, health, and the body. It brings tools from visual culture studies and art history into conversation with the health humanities and the history of medicine, exploring topics such as anatomy, dissection, and objectivity; physician portraits; the ethics of medical photography; and the symbiotic relationship between contemporary art and health. The course is organized largely by medium; we will be looking at prints and printmaking, objects, paintings, illustrations, photography, film and medical imaging, and a range of contemporary artworks. 

Art and medicine is a two-way street: we will explore how these tools for analyzing and understanding art and visual culture can help those in healthcare professions ethically and culturally, and how studying medicine and the body in art can help us to understand our world, our health, and our bodies better. Because of the scope of this topic, we will largely focus on the modern period and on Western art and medicine, while bringing in examples from diverse groups and time periods. We will also be exploring the breadth of what “visual culture” can mean. 

MHB 432: Data, Health, and Society

Today, our engagement with health and healthcare is mediated through data. We track physiological parameters through wearable devices, calculate our chances of developing diseases via myriad risk scores, and identify optimal treatments using machine learning algorithms trained on vast quantities of data. This course seeks to understand the historical precedents to our modern, data-centric style of experiencing illness—and the historical conditions that have made it possible. Covering the early modern period to the present day, the course will explore how the meanings and uses of what we now call “data” have interacted with broader social, cultural, and material practices. Cultures of health data have co-evolved changing technologies of information processing, social structures undergirding data collection, ideologies dictating whose data matters (or whose data can be easily collected), among many other factors. Historical study of health data illuminates the historical and contingent processes by which data get made, helping students think critically about the limits, applications, and implications of big data in the twenty-first century.

MHB 440: History of the Body

This course will provide students with a grasp on the fluid ideal of the “normative” human body throughout history; it will also provide them with a toolkit for writing, at the graduate school level, rigorous historical work that focuses on the body and its discontents. Students will consider the body from an interdisciplinary perspective, looking at the different ways in which the body has been conceptualized and represented in medicine and culture throughout historical periods and in different geographical areas. These scientific, bioethical, philosophical, and cultural conceptualizations of the body have had and continue to have significant implications for patients and for the scientists and clinicians who study the body and who provide care. Throughout the fourteen themes explored this semester, students will learn to question and disassemble the binaries, categorization methods, and social constructions of the body

MHB 473: Unsafe America

62,000,000 cases involving medical attention per year across the country. Since the nineteenth century, “accidents” from car crashes to the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster have become increasingly central to American life. This course charts the history of accidents and explains why U.S. society has chosen to control some risks but not others. We will explore how accidents have changed over time alongside the introduction and diffusion of new technologies; cultural beliefs about safety; the political and economic interests of specific stakeholders; and the efforts of experts, corporations, nonprofits, families, and the government to keep the public safe. On one level, the course follows the unforeseen effects of modern industry, transportation, infrastructure, and consumer products. On another, it demonstrates how the ideals of personal responsibility and free enterprise continue to influence the safety movement. Using injuries as a lens, we will combine history with technical communication and public policy. We will also learn skills including close reading, critical thinking, primary and secondary research, and writing. 

MHB 480: The Disabled Body in Medicine and Culture

Throughout much of modern medical and cultural history, bodily difference has been categorized as disability—as a problematic deviation from standards of normalcy and health. This legacy has been fiercely debated and contested in recent years, with much disagreement about the category’s usefulness in medical contexts and beyond. This course will explore different perspectives on disability through works of modern culture, and primarily through literature, television, and film. We will investigate the traditional medical model of disability, and explore what changing understandings of disability mean for the future of healthcare and the relationship between healthcare providers and patients. The course is writing-intensive, and requires students to share and workshop their papers with peers.