STSC 009 Healing Narratives
Offered:Spring 2008
Mackenzie TR 10:30-12
Critical Writing Seminar (fulfills College writing requirement)
This writing seminar will explore the role of the story in medicine and healing. We will learn about the field of narrative medicine, designed to help health professionals enhance their empathic skills, discover the connections between narrative and the healing arts, and become acquainted with the practice of expressive writing to promote immune system function.
Students will learn to read and analyze academic writing from a variety of disciplines (e.g., medical humanities, nursing, cultural anthropology, and psychology) and will write essays on topics related to these readings. These assignments will give students the opportunity to draw upon their subjective experiences of health, illness and healing. The content for this seminar is interdisciplinary, drawing from a wide range of sources in the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences.
The course has five sub-themes: the personal experience narrative; writing as health promotion; narrative, empathy and the art of healing; illness narratives; subject/object: statements of truth and authority. The writing assignments and readings will follow these general themes, although there will be overlap given the nature of the topic. This course is suitable for those students who intend to go into any of the health professions, plan to conduct fieldwork that entails collecting personal experience narratives, want to reflect more deeply on their relationship with their own body, or are interested in the subjective experience of illness and health.
