WGSS 212: Literature and Medicine

This course offers students the chance to engage with texts that raise some of the largest existential questions of human life, including the nature of health and disease, the doctor-patient relationship, the social aspects of illness, and the dimensions of a well-lived life. Through the works of authors like Mary Shelley, Lev Tolstoy, Michael Ondaatje, Atul Gawande, Eula Biss, and Anne Boyer, we will explore questions of sickness and health beyond the biomedical paradigm to consider these questions through a humanistic lens. Fulfills the humanities elective requirement for the applied minor in Medical Humanities.