Medicine in Action

4 Credits.

There are few topics more fascinating than medicine in the United States. The U.S. offers some of the world’s best clinicians, technology, and biomedical scientists. At the same time, it has perhaps the most Byzantine, expensive, and inequitable health system in the world. Life and death, near-miraculous procedures, frustration, elation, desperation, and discovery—the panoply of human experience plays out daily in a major research hospital like Johns Hopkins. Of course, our society’s larger social challenges—such as gun violence, chronic diseases, and extreme socioeconomic inequity—spill over into hospital hallways and create countless human dramas. For the committed science writer, the biomedical beat offers a career’s worth of engaging, challenging stories.Medicine in Action is an intense, immersive experience based at the world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine in Baltimore. Students observe doctors and nurses in action, hear patients’ stories, and meet with biomedical researchers. In past courses, students have attended surgery, joined a medical resident on rounds, and interviewed a Nobel laureate. Students work on joint reporting projects, stretch their writing skills through exercises, and produce a medical story based on the week’s experience.