3.0

Average Course Rating

This First-Year Seminar is designed to introduce you to the human side of medicine by exploring ways in which patients and medical practitioners describe their personal experience. It has been structured to allow you to engage that material by reading it, viewing it in film, discussing it, writing about it and meeting with a practicing physician. Its a course not only about content, but also about process, the process of thoughtfully and openly engaging work about the lives of others. It is a seminar style course that emphasizes a friendly, protected setting in which to explore these issues. The course is facilitated by an experienced member of the Hopkins Medical Faculty, and has been designed to open a window through which you can begin to study the human concerns of patients and practitioners. The course is most likely to appeal to premedical and pre-health related students who are interested in exploring the human side of medicine, but also to students interested in biography, memoir and life-writing. At the end of this course, you will have gained an appreciation for some of the ways in which people express themselves about the illness experience or about working with the sick. You will have had a chance to develop longer, more personal relationship to such accounts than you are likely to have in clinical encounters in medical schools, training programs or even in clinical rotations. It takes time to listen. The course draws a small sample from a very wide range of such accounts that number in the thousands, so there is no attempt to generalize; rather, every effort is made to immerse ourselves into one account at a time and to understand one person’s experience at a time. Through this kind of immersion, you will develop a sense of how illness can affect a life, and the way in which practitioners become involved to find themselves in their own work.