In the Faculty of Arts teaching is organised in two twelve-week teaching blocks.

Teaching Block One

Teaching Block Two

Descriptions

Philosophy and History of Medicine

This unit surveys the “making” of modern medicine from the French Revolution to the AIDS pandemic. It explores some of the key epistemological frameworks of our medical world in their socio-historical context. It traces the creation in the nineteenth century of two new medical institutions, hospitals and laboratories, of new medical professionals working in them, and of new causal understandings of disease. Turning to the twentieth century, it then traces the formation of biomedicine and national health care systems, and examines the implications of efforts to standardize medical knowledge and practice through the clinical trial and evidence-based medicine.

Throughout, the unit explores the tensions between the increasing objectification of medicine and the subjective dimensions of doctors’ knowledge and patients’ illness. Addressing the changing relationship between the doctor and patient, science and medicine, and concepts of health and disease, the unit critically assesses the nature and status of disease categories, medical expertise and medical knowledge. This unit is open to medical and philosophy students.

English option one: Critical issues (in English Literature)

This unit introduces students to some central issues and debates in literary criticism and theory. These will be encountered in the context of the study of particular texts, usually a mixture of novels and plays.

By considering these texts in the light of designated topics, students will become acquainted with the guiding ideas (and, to an extent, with the specialized vocabularies) of some of the most influential schools of criticism and theory in the twentieth century, such as feminism, narratology, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, nationalism, and new-historicism.

The unit comprises a weekly two hour seminar underpinned by a wide range of textual and critical sources and is assessed by two essays of 2,000 and 4,000 words respectively.

Literature and Medicine

This unit will explore the interrelation between medicine and literature across a range of literary genres and historical periods. Drawing on this historical perspective, it will explore the changing literary representations of patients, illness and the medical profession.

Topics will include: the body in literature; the complex interaction of literature and psychoanalysis; illness and the nature of artistic experience; Shakespeare and medicine; literary constructions of physical and mental illness; and illness as metaphor. Open to both English and Medical Students, the unit will expose students to the challenges of interdisciplinarity.

The unit comprises a weekly two hour seminar underpinned by a wide range of textual and critical sources and is assessed by two essays of 2,000 and 4,000 words respectively.

Philosophy option two: Death, Dying and Disease

Dissertation

This dissertation unit, unique to iBAMH, is designed to allow students to demonstrate their ability to integrate their learning from the other units of the programme.

Students write a dissertaton of 6,500 to 8,000 words (including quotations and notes, excluding bibliography) on a subject of their own choice, agreed by the Unit Director and a supervisor from the Departments of English or Philosophy.

The topic of the dissertation must include some aspect of the medical humanities and draw on learning in other units in the programme. Depending on the topic, additional supervision from a clinician may be available.

Students meet regularly with their supervisor(s), prepare plans of work, demonstrate abilities to search and assimilate information from a variety of sources and produce a well reasoned account in clear academic prose.

Topics for dissertations in recent years have included: Lovesickness in Literature and Biomedicine; The Royal Navy, Cholera and Quarantine in the Nineteenth Century; A Case for Race-Based Medicine within the Clinical Encounter: Scientificness, Racism, and Racial Identity; Death without God in Tennyson's In Memoriam; Dracula in Literature and Medicine; Women and depression in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Alice Birchâs Anatomy of a Suicide; Nutrition and the Death Camps; Narrative Competence and its Lessons for the Clinic; The Physical and Metaphysical in Keats; A Discussion of the Importance of Medical Humanities in the Practice of Medicine; What is Gender Dysphoria? Contesting the pathologisation of the trans identity; Medical Humanitarianism and Biocitizenship: South Africa's Struggle with HIV/AIDS; (S)Mothered: Exploring Maternal Identity in Toni Morrisons Beloved and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.