Stephanie Hilger, hilger@illinois.edu
Wed, 3:00-5:00 PM
Medical Humanities, and its extension, the Health Humanities, are a growing field of research and teaching with implications far beyond the humanities. This seminar will begin with an overview of the history of and the major debates in the discipline. We will then familiarize ourselves with specific subsets and related fields such as narrative medicine, graphic medicine, public health humanities, translational health humanities, and veterinary humanities. We will also investigate Medical/Health Humanities’ intersections with the study of race, gender, and disability. In addition to narratives by patients and physicians, we will read Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, MK Czerwiec’s Graphic Medicine Manifesto, Rita Charon’s Narrative Medicine, Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory, Anne Fausto Sterling’s Sexing the Body, among other texts.