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Courses

MHB 410  Bioethics at the Bedside: How Clinicians Think Ethically
4 credit hours             Fall Semester 
Course Description:  Most ethical dilemmas in medicine arise at the bedside. Wrestling with these challenging conflicts is a core task of the clinical application of bioethics in medicine and nursing. Using real cases, guided by an interdisciplinary team of practicing clinicians and educators in bioethics and law, this course examines three fundamental subjects of bioethics that arise in medical practice: informed consent, organ transplantation, and death and dying.

MHB 420  Stories in Healthcare: Clinicians, Patients and Narrative Medicine
4 credit hours             Fall Semester
Course Description:  The practice of medicine depends on stories.  Patients tell their stories to doctors; doctors listen to and interpret these stories.  Clinicians then use information gathered from patients’ narratives to guide diagnosis and treatment. In this course, students identify and develop narrative skills and techniques that doctors and other clinicians use in practice, through the close study of narratives (poems, fiction, essays, films, etc.) and discussion of key texts in narrative medicine. Topics include: Playing God, Death, Cancer, Doctor/Patient Relationship, and others. Sessions are team taught by a clinician-writer and a clinician-educator in literature.

MHB 430  Visual Arts and Healthcare:  Framing the Field
4 credit hours             Spring Semester
Course Description:  Medicine in many ways is a visual discipline. All aspects of its practice depends on the practitioners’ expert visual skills from observation, to diagnosis, to the delivery of treatment. Defining the visual arts to embrace disciplines as diverse as 15th century engravings to contemporary media and educational toys, “Framing the Field” will survey the significant role the visual arts have played historically in medicine as it also considers how they are informing the practice of medicine and healthcare today. Throughout the course, students will learn the art and practice of close looking and apply research skills to follow visual leads to the object’s “back stories and hidden agendas,” ultimately developing tools that will be equally applicable in the museum and at the bedside.

MHB 440  History of the Body In Science & Medicine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
4 credit hours             Fall Semester
Course Description:  This medical history course explores key developments in scientific knowledge, technologies and cultural ideas about the human body in health and disease. Beginning with Hippocrates and ending with Human Genomics, students will consider the medicalized body from interdisciplinary perspectives, including history, medicine, philosophy, biology, genetics, literature, and visual arts.  The different ways in which the “body” has been conceptualized in Western medicine and culture in the past and the present has significant implications for the patient and for the scientists and clinicians who provide treatment and care.  Each week we will consider the body in a different historical period to explore the scientific developments and cultural context of the time.  Students will consider the implications for patients, clinicians and scientists using medical cases, patient experiences, scientific debates, and representations of medicine in popular culture.  We will compare and contrast the issues of the body in these historical settings with contemporary healthcare "examples" in the 21st C.   Teaching in this course is interdisciplinary and will present contrasting and possibly conflicting perspectives by scientists, humanities scholars and clinicians in medicine and nursing.

MHB 450  Master’s Research Methods
4 credit hours             Fall Semester
Course Description:  This is an introductory graduate course in research design, methods, data collection, and practices in the health and social sciences. The course will enhance students’ literacy as both a consumer and producer of research. The course is intended to provide a broad foundation for more advanced graduate course work in research methodology and data analysis.

MHB 460  Academic Writing
2 credit hours                Fall Semester
2 credit hours                Spring Semester
Course Description:  This course aims to develop students' academic writing proficiency in a range of textual genres to communicate ideas, analysis, and arguments to a range of audiences and for a number of purposes.  

MHB 495  Capstone Project
2 credit hours             Fall Semester
6 credit hours             Spring Semester

Course Description:  The Capstone Project translates theoretical knowledge into praxis.  Students apply knowledge from the humanities disciplines to a question or issue in contemporary U.S. healthcare as a scholarly, research, or educational project.  Students enroll in MHB495 Capstone Project to implement their project plan through independent study and individualized supervision with mentors and other content experts, and present their final projects for evaluation.