Health and humanities: new programs toward deepening care for those in need. An interview with Prof. Carol Ann Farkas. From the interview:

Before I had learned much about the health humanities, I was eager to teach Narrative and Medicine because, frankly, I just thought it would be fun for me, and a fun way to reach our undergraduates, for whom we do not yet have a humanities degree, and who consequently have relatively little preparation in studying literature. But then I started to read more of the scholarship on the health humanities, and could see the rationale for the course unfolding in front of me: my students were already, somewhat simplistically, absorbing some of the more harmful lessons of the “hidden curriculum” of health care practice in this country, where providers have a paternalistic knowledge of what’s best, and patients who don’t “adhere” well to treatment are regarded as frustrations, rather than equals. I’ve come to see our course, and other courses in the humanities, as an absolutely essential part of the undergraduate health sciences curriculum – these courses challenge the students in terms of critical thinking, imagination, and empathy, and demand that they pay compassionate attention to what it means – for them, for their students – to be human, to be humane….

What unites scholars, working from a variety of disciplinary methods and theories – is an interest in how health and illness function as sites of meaning in culture, and as profound experiences which we humans all share. 

For other posts on narrative medicine, see here