LIT3438 - Spring 2025 - Kennedy

This course studies literary and historical texts -- nineteenth-century essays, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry -- as well as current scholarship, in order to understand historical medical debates, how they changed over time, and how they shaped contemporary medicine. This course builds skills in critical reading and writing, cultural practice, and ethics. We’ll examine illness as metaphor; the art and science of medicine; the rise of medical realism, objectivity and authority; the roles of the physician, nurse, and patient; the meaning of patient privacy and consent; medical professionalism and alternative medicine; food adulteration, nutrition; disability rights; prosthetics and the integrity of the body; pain, anesthetics, and drug use; and the “good death" -- as well as topics in epidemiology, sanitary reform, epidemics, and personal vs. public health. We will focus on literary analysis (for example, how does this text use metaphor?); historical and cultural analysis (how does the meaning of disease change over time?); and ethical analysis (to whom is the author responsible? how do we balance the right to knowledge with the right to privacy? what is the role of the patient’s narrative?). Students will complete critical and historical research for one analytic and one personal (creative) essay response to the debates we study. This course fulfills the Ethics and Humanities/Cultural Practice requirements in the Liberal Studies Curriculum and the “W” (State-Mandated Writing) credit. It will also help students prepare for the Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skill section of the MCAT.