Courses
MHB 410 Bioethics at the Bedside: How Clinicians Think Ethically
3 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
3 credit hours Fall or Spring 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
3 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
3 credit hours Fall Semester (not being offered Fall 2023)
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
3 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 480 The Disabled Body in Medicine and Culture
3 credit hours Fall Semester
Course Description: 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.
MHB 495 Capstone Development I
3 credit hours Fall Semester
Course Description: Health Humanities and Bioethics are constantly developing fields where the scholarship and research aspects continues to evolve. Capstone Practicum projects are diverse by topic and method and provide an opportunity for students to work independently with the guidance of a Capstone advisor, department faculty and content experts. Students learn to apply knowledge from the health humanities and bioethics disciplines to a question or issue in contemporary healthcare as an academic, research, or scholarly project. Students identify a topic of research or scholarship, and work with an advisor from the department to develop a project plan that culminates in a presentation to the department, including their peers in the program. A Master’s program is a first step towards a graduate level of scholarship and the Capstone Practicum project is a first attempt to generate independent project ideas, work independently and engage with a topic in a particular health humanities and/or bioethics area of interest.
MHB 496 Capstone Development II
3 credit hours Spring Semester
Course Description: Health Humanities and Bioethics are constantly developing fields where the scholarship and research aspects continues to evolve. Capstone Practicum projects are diverse by topic and method and provide an opportunity for students to work independently with the guidance of a Capstone advisor, department faculty and content experts. Students learn to apply knowledge from the health humanities and bioethics disciplines to a question or issue in contemporary healthcare as an academic, research, or scholarly project. Students identify a topic of research or scholarship, and work with an advisor from the department to develop a project plan that culminates in a presentation to the department, including their peers in the program. A Master’s program is a first step towards a graduate level of scholarship and the Capstone Practicum project is a first attempt to generate independent project ideas, work independently and engage with a topic in a particular health humanities and/or bioethics area of interest.
MHB 497 Capstone Practicum
4 credit hours Spring Semester
Course Description: Health Humanities and Bioethics are constantly developing fields where the scholarship and research aspects continues to evolve. Capstone Practicum projects are diverse by topic and method and provide an opportunity for students to work independently with the guidance of a Capstone advisor, department faculty and content experts. Students learn to apply knowledge from the health humanities and bioethics disciplines to a question or issue in contemporary healthcare as an academic, research, or scholarly project. Students identify a topic of research or scholarship, and work with an advisor from the department to develop a project plan that culminates in a presentation to the department, including their peers in the program. A Master’s program is a first step towards a graduate level of scholarship and the Capstone Practicum project is a first attempt to generate independent project ideas, work independently and engage with a topic in a particular health humanities and/or bioethics area of interest.