Course Description

How do patients, real and fictional, tell the story of their own illness? How do those stories compare to the ones told by health professionals? Can stories help us heal, and help us improve patient-doctor relations? We will address these questions through global and domestic examples of narrative medicine, and will write our own stories, to explore what they can teach us about who we are as individuals, our cultures, and the relationship between health, self, cultural context, and narrative. This course will involve reading and responding to a variety of short narratives that combine story and medicine together. We will explore these texts and what they can teach us about who we are as individuals and what it means to be a community. The class will examine an assortment of engaging essays, works of fiction and more as we learn about storytelling through health care.

Course Reviews

Reviews coming soon.