Story as Medicine: Reading as Healing

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course will introduce students to Narrative Medicine, a burgeoning interdisciplinary field of study that focuses on the close reading of literature as a means of helping physicians, nurses, therapists, and other caregivers to develop narrative competencies that will assist them in improving patient care. Students in the course will explore seminal texts in the field of narrative medicine and begin to develop these competencies through the close reading of works by novelists John Green (the 2025 Ruskin Lecturer at Notre Dame) and Garth Greenwell, as well as works of memoir, fiction and graphic novel by Marya Hornbacher, Joan Didion, and Storozynski Writers in Residence Cleo Quian and Joan Reilly. The course will explore the connections between reading literature and the development of empathy, the role that reading plays in the development of Theory of Mind, and the ways that literary study helps to articulate professional standards in caregiving.