ENGL 219

Spring 2024 All Classes

All Classes

Literature and Medicine

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Credit: 3 hours.

Introduction to the interchange between the medical and literary imaginations – how diseases, bodies, and minds get written about and represented culturally. The premise of the course is that ideas and experiences concerning our health are always mediated through the literature we read, the films we watch, and the stories we tell our doctors and that they tell us. Our focus will be on how literature and film have played and continue to play a crucial role in understanding health on local, national, and global scales.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

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ENGL 219 class schedule data for spring 2024
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	71008	Lecture-Discussion	G	10:00AM -10:50AM	MWF	English Building	Gaedtke, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/16/24-05/01/24 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts course. Section Info: SP24 - ENGL 219 - Literature and Medicine - Andrew Gaedtke - This course introduces students to the literature of medicine. We will take up questions at the forefront of “medical humanities”—a field that examines cultural attitudes toward illness and recovery, the dramas and power dynamics of the clinic, and the lived experiences of doctors and patients. We will think through the ways that our experiences of health and illness are not simply given or universal but are shaped by the literature we read, the films we watch, the stories we tell our doctors and that they tell us. In our discussions we will ask what kinds of narratives, character types, and assumptions about health and illness can be discerned from medical literature and how have these changed over time. Are there alternative attitudes toward these experiences that we might be able to recognize in new or forgotten representations of health and illness? In what ways have assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and “the human” been constructed through ideas about health, illness, and abnormality? How can health care professionals’ delivery of care be improved through forms of literary training and knowledge? The course is open to all and may be of special interest to students who are considering a future in health care. We will likely discuss works by Roxane Gay, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Prebbles, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Damon Tweedy, Virginia Woolf, and others. Restriction(s): Restricted to Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.