Foundations of Medicine, Society and Culture

3 Units

Topics will include comparative medical systems and concepts of health, medical history, illness narratives and narrative ethics, social determinants of health and health inequalities, analysis of representations of illness and medicine in literature and the arts, and medical rhetoric. Students who complete the course should develop a command of the basic problems, approaches, and literatures in the social and cultural contexts of health sickness, and medicine. Students will be able to identify epistemology, theory, methodology and data from neighboring disciplines and understand affordances and costs in each.