3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Medicine involves encounters with unruly bodies, treatments that can be both hopeful and brutal, and the specter of mortality, in a context of complex bureaucratic and technological systems. Healthcare providers, patients, and their loved ones turn to writing to make sense of and communicate their experiences. This writing course, co-taught by faculty in the School of Medicine and the University Writing Program, takes as its subject matter the resulting texts, which form part of the meta-genre of life writing. Together, we will read—and watch—narratives by patients and providers. We will learn from physicians and rhetoricians about the significance of writing in medicine, from therapeutic tool to call for change. Students will analyze and produce life writing of their own, via a reflective journal, a review of a life writing text, and a narrative of an encounter with medicine that draws on their own experience or research into someone else’s story. In the process, students will examine the culture of medicine and reflect on the experiences and values that shape their own relationship to health, illness, and treatment. No prior writing experience required! All first-year students who have taken Reintro and all students at the sophomore level or above are welcome.