Medical Humanities in a Global Context

FAIN: AKB-265735-19

University of South Florida (Tampa, FL 33620-9951)
Benjamin Scott Young (Project Director: October 2018 to July 2023)
Catherine Wilkins (Co Project Director: April 2019 to July 2023)

Implementation of a new general education pathway in the Honors College that would integrate the humanities into the institution’s medical and global programs.

The Honors College at the University of South Florida proposes to develop ten new, and seven revised, interdisciplinary courses as part of a new program entitled “Medical Humanities in a Global Context.” These integrated interdisciplinary courses will offer students a pathway through the USF Honors College curriculum and aims to cultivate more critical, holistic, and experiential perspectives on health and human experience.

Associated Products

Spatial Effects: Places for Healing and Well-being (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Spatial Effects: Places for Healing and Well-being
Author: Atsuko Sakai
Abstract: The places we inhabit everyday are mostly invisible for the majority of people. Unless we provide an opportunity to observe and analyze them—our surroundings are generally taken for granted much like breathing air. Most people do not realize that our surroundings and how they are designed can affect our daily functions and behavior— often unconsciously, and that good design can contribute in a positive way to our feelings and healing because the ultimate goal of spatial design is the embodiment of human experience. In this course, we will start with phenomenology of architecture, and then we will apply these concepts to spatial designs for care, healing, and well-being. The course consists of five critical themes: 1) Design Philosophy; 2) Neuroscience and Architecture; 3) Places for Healing in a Global Context; 4) Places for Well-being in a Local Context; and 5) Design Thinking - Design Processes for Improving our Surroundings.
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

Narrative Medicine (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Narrative Medicine
Author: Lindy Davidson
Abstract: Medical institutions rely heavily on lists in order to communicate with and about patients (Browning, 1992), yet Arthur Frank (1995) says that patients find their way through illness by telling their stories. In order to improve understanding about patients’ perspectives of health and illness, their stories must be reclaimed from the diagnostic lists and treatments that dominate patient identities. As medical schools begin to select students based not only on their scientific acumen but also their understanding of the humanities, they are recognizing what Rita Charon (2008) states: Along with their growing scientific expertise, doctors need the expertise to listen to their patients, to understand as best they can the ordeals of illness, to honor the meanings of their patients’ narratives of illness, and to be moved by what they behold so that they can act on their patients’ behalf (p. 3). In addition to aiding in their treatment of patients, narrative medicine offers a means for medical practitioners to reflect on difficult cases by exploring their emotions and personal challenges in a career that is marked by significant stress (Roscoe, 2012). Students will read illness narratives and the theoretical background of narrative medicine, develop their own personal narratives of health and illness, and work with others to narrativize their illness experiences.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate

Masculinities, Health, & (Dis)Order (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Masculinities, Health, & (Dis)Order
Author: Holly Singh
Abstract: This course centers on how masculinities influence health behaviors, outcomes, and ethical debates in the contemporary world, introducing and drawing on methods of inquiry, discovery, and knowledge creation from the social and behavioral sciences. Topics will include: making gender and gendered bodies; sexuality and changing gender roles; family and male honor; men's health; and masculinities in religion, nationalism, violence, and global commerce.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate

Health, Healing, and Everyday Crises in Southeast Asia (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Health, Healing, and Everyday Crises in Southeast Asia
Author: Holly Singh
Abstract: Using regions in the Majority World as sites of study, this course explores how the interconnectedness of diverse spaces, places, and peoples constitute community. Through the examination of locales, historical periods, and the people who inhabit them, students will take an interdisciplinary approach to the relationships between the local, regional and global.
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

Acquisition of Knowledge: Medical Humanities in a Global Context (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Acquisition of Knowledge: Medical Humanities in a Global Context
Author: Atsuko Sakai
Author: Benjamin Young
Abstract: Ranging from classical philosophy to the digital age, the course invites students to explore the different ways in which knowledge is created and consumed, how understanding is cultivated, the various relationships possible between knowledge and the self, and the implications of these in our contemporary world. Through an examination of common topics, independent research, studio experiences, and assignments, this course will explore the meaning and value of interdisciplinary inquiry for the cultivation of practical wisdom in our personal and civic lives.Unlike our typical AOK classes, this class focuses on a specific theme, Medical Humanities (MH). DSS 1-MHGC:Why Study Medical Humanities? DSS 2-MHGC:Introducing Medical Humanities: History & Concept DSS 3-MHGC:Exploring Philosophical Approaches DSS 4-MHGC:Eudaimonia: Human Well-being beyond the Absence of Illness DSS 5-MHGC:Theory & Practice: Making Art Accessible to People DSS 6-MHGC:Theory & Practice: Observing & Making Sense DSS 7-MHGC:Problem Solving: Architecture & Design DSS 8-MHGC:Existential Case Study: Judgment & Context DSS 9-MHGC:Existential Case Study: Stories DSS 10-MHGC:Conclusion: Medical Humanities in a Global Context Medical Humanities (DSS) sessions will include specific cases and stories along with additional resources for your reference. Therefore, the course-preparation materials for Medical Humanities are multi-faceted, which is intended to help you explore different types of, ideas about, and approaches to Medical Humanities within a limited timeframe. Ultimately, you should be able to provide your own answer to the question “What are Medical Humanities?” and at the end of the semester you might discover areas within the field of Medical Humanities you would be interested in when considering your Medical Humanities pathway at the Honors College.
Year: 2019
Audience: Undergraduate

Physicians of the Soul: Medicine, Philosophy, and the Good Life (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Physicians of the Soul: Medicine, Philosophy, and the Good Life
Author: Benjamin Scott Young
Abstract: The origins of medicine and philosophy are deeply connected. This is true not only in the Western traditions, but in many cultural and intellectual settings throughout the world. Moreover, not only is the historical development of philosophy and medicine inseparably interwoven, but they share a common motivation—and so also a common intellectual and emotional pattern. This motivation might best be expressed simply as “care for well-being.” Medicine cares for the well-being of the body and philosophy cares for the well-being of thoughts, beliefs, and experience. Both traditions struggle to articulate what “well-being” means for human beings—body and mind—and both develop methods and procedures by which to remedy and avoid identifiable pathologies and errors. Furthermore, like the analogy that Plato’s Socrates draws in Protagoras, whereby he imagines the similarities between those who care for the body—physicians—and those who care for the soul—philosophers (i.e., “physicians of the soul”)—the one who participates in the cultivation of culture might be thought of as a “physician of culture.” Both the body and the mind are experienced through the inherited cultural constellation of ideas, practices, and concerns that have shaped our lives from birth. To examine, compare, appreciate, and critique these inherited cultural ideas participates too in that same care for well-being. Despite having been “thrown,” as it were, into an always already on-going constellation of cultural traditions, each of us is also always in the position to evaluate these, select some, discard others, and create still more. This process of evaluation and creativity with regards to the question of what sort of life is most worth of our love and striving might be summed up as: the question and quest for the good life. Therefore, our aim in this course is to draw on both philosophy and medicine to enable us to understand the everyday practical and existential question about the choiceworth life.
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

Experience Japan - from Hospitals to Hospitality (Omotenashi) (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Experience Japan - from Hospitals to Hospitality (Omotenashi)
Author: Atsuko Sakai
Abstract: What does it mean and what does it take to “care” for others? This course asks these basic questions through explorations of Japan. Throughout its history Japan has fought to survive natural disasters, famines and disease in addition to the fighting between Samurais to unite the country’s leadership. The customary practices—extending from daily habits (such as taking a bath or drinking tea) to superstitious rituals—often came from the fear of sickness, hope for a cure, and prayer. We will study the history of Japan and examine various artifacts (literature, arts, designed objects and spaces, etc.), which reflect these customary practices and beliefs from different time periods. Modern Japan also faces serious social issues including suicide, overwork, unbalanced demographics due to low birth rates, and negative environmental effects associated with industrialization, natural disasters, and war. While these current issues are not unknown to other countries, there are some public health systems and services unique to Japan such as a Mother-Child Pocketbook. Thus, we will analyze the “caring” system in Japan from various perspectives including medical, health, nursing, and childcare.
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

The Compassionate City: A Social Autopsy (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: The Compassionate City: A Social Autopsy
Author: Ulluminair Salim
Abstract: What is a city, and how does emotion influence its development and health? This course is premised on the notion that cities are people(d). We ​are cities. We make policies. We draw boundaries. We decide who is in and who is out, who is dangerous and who is safe. We design buildings. We invest money or divest, and we have the capacity to perpetuate harm or cultivate compassion within cityscapes. While cities often are characterized as bustling epicenters of trade, consumption, development, and creation, they also are spaces rife with conflict and complexity. This course examines social problems within cities, proposing that we can challenge and erode oppressive structures within them, and thereby contribute to the health of a city. Through examination of social issues such as immigration and indigeneity, homelessness and place, imagined communities and so-called dangerous classes, we will identify patterns of (in)compassion and envision new paradigms and structures that give everyone a right to health in the city.
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

Beasts and Burdens: Survival, Imagination, and the Politics of Risk in the (Global) South (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Beasts and Burdens: Survival, Imagination, and the Politics of Risk in the (Global) South
Author: Ulluminair Salim
Abstract: "Can the subaltern speak?" --Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak Beasts and Burdens will investigate health (inequality) and risk through the artistic lens of women and children in southern, postcolonial spaces, examining their critical, creative, and unconventional responses to subjugation. Through thematic and geographic “travels,” students will examine axes of inequality, subalternity, and survival among women and children across the globe. This course will leverage audio, video, imagery, and narrative as windows into the social imaginary. Several questions animate this course including the following: What are ways in which women’s voices emerge in the humanistic social sciences, and how do their voices circulate? How can students and scholars of the (global) south envision alternative narratives and intervene upon existing characterizations? That is, what are elsewheres and elsewhens of representing power and agency in southern spaces? Finally, what are ways in which we can critically theorize gender inequality, health, and resilience in risky spaces? How can we map them and map onto them? As such, the study of (gendered) violence, power, and socioeconomic and environmental conflict are central to the issues that this course seeks to examine. While this course privileges the stories and lived experiences of women and children of the (global) south because they often are silent and/or silenced in academic spaces, it welcomes students of all gender identities.
Year: 2021
Audience: Undergraduate

Arts and Health at the Ringling Museum of Art (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Arts and Health at the Ringling Museum of Art
Author: Catherine Wilkins
Abstract: In this collaboration between the USF Honors College and the Ringling Museum of Art, Honors students learn about medical conditions such as dementia, depression, substance use disorder, and PTSD and are trained to facilitate interactions with works of art for patient groups dealing with these diagnoses. Students will learn how to deliver therapeutic interactions with art that allow participants to give their own personal interpretations without fear of judgment or failure. The methods utilized in class have been found to help patients access and express memories, improve communication skills, externalize emotions, relieve stress and anxiety, and promote positive feelings. This class will also instruct students in the practices of observation, deep listening, and critical thinking, build empathy and understanding, and engage students with the community. This capstone course will allow students to participate in furthering the research in these areas by providing an immersive experience at the intersection of art, medicine, and mental health.
Year: 2021
Audience: Undergraduate

Global Health with People First (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Global Health with People First
Author: Holly Donahue Singh
Abstract: This course introduces students to the general principles and foundations of public health using a global framework and giving particular emphasis to qualitative and mixed methods health research. This approach centers the experiences and perspectives of people who comprise health systems, experience health systems, and face the consequences of policy. It introduces students to the social and behavioral sciences through cultural and sociopolitical inquiry and aims to cultivate ethical ideas and practices pertaining to civic engagement, dimensions of human experience, and the complexity of social interaction.
Year: 2021
Audience: Undergraduate

Honors Health Humanities Circle (3HC) (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Honors Health Humanities Circle (3HC)
Author: Benjamin Young
Abstract: The Honors Health Humanities Circle (3HC) is a student-led orgnization at the Judy Genshaft Honors College that aims to help student disseminate their undergraduate research and to prompt the Medical Humanities through regular topical events (e.g., guest lectures, workshops, etc.). Both the "Narrative, Health, and Interpreting Practice" and the "Undergraduate Medical Humanities Research" workshops have been incorporated into the 3HC.
Year: 2021
Audience: Undergraduate

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