UC Medical Humanities Consortium
Creators: name: University Of California Office Of The President
Publisher: name: University of California Office of the President
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/00dmfq477
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: The proposed Medical Humanities Consortium will foster collaboration between faculty and advanced students in UC medical centers and arts and humanities departments in order to generate dialogue that advances our mutual understanding of how cultures define and address issues in human health and disease. At heart this is a pedagogical collaboration, with a mission to develop and share new curricular innovations that allow humanists and biomedical investigators to see how different perspectives on common concerns (from disease to illness, pathology to health policy) can complement, rather than compete against, our abilities to articulate richer meanings of health and illness. The Consortium will be co-directed by faculty from four UC campuses, each of whom has been independently developing medical humanities programs (extracurricular and curricular) at their home institutions. The Consortium has three main objectives. First, to improve the overall educational mission of medical humanities. This will be accomplished through developing new elective syllabi through centralized online resources and workshops to develop case studies where humanists and medical students can together analyze social and clinical issues. Second, our pooled resources will offer student research support for summer projects, feeding an annual publication (through agreement with UC Press already obtained) disseminating the scholarship of medical humanities. Third, to establish a peer-review and mentoring community under the aegis of the UC Medical Humanities Consortium that will offer legitimacy to what is currently—internationally—a marginalized academic pursuit. The Consortium aims to create a common ground where students and faculty from “two cultures” who share a commitment to investigating humanism in medicine can learn a new language of interdisciplinary collaboration that is not constricted by conventional boundaries separating scientific and humanist disciplines. The collaborating faculty from each of the four participating UC campuses come from both humanities departments and clinical departments. Each has years of experience teaching courses to both medical students and non-medical students in the area of medical humanities—reflective writing, narrative medicine, history of medicine, medical anthropology and ethnography. It is important to underscore that the aims of this Consortium do not end at identifying diverse scholars with a general interest in medicine or “the human condition.” The mission of the Consortium is to demonstrate the importance of teaching future generations of students how to read and engage critically with literature and representations from both sides of the arts/science spectrum. Our goal is to demonstrate that social analysis is not antithetical to scientific analysis (and vice versa), and that without an appreciable understanding of one, the meaning of the other remains incomplete.