Blue Book Electives:
Literature and Medicine

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Course Description:

Medicine and literature share a fundamental concern with the human condition in that they both ask:

What does it mean to be human?

What can threaten that humanity?

In discussing the literature about illness and health, the student is given a safe place to practice the interpretive skills crucial to medical practice.

Learning to listen to the stories patients tell making sense of those narratives enable one to better read one's patients.

The course will explore various genres of literature, and examine the way they each reveal the complexities of health, illness and practice.