This talk concerns medical humanities curricula in undergraduate education, stressing the initial exigence for setting up such curricula, strategies for getting students interested and enrolling them in the program, and challenges to programmatic relevancy. I call on my eight years of experience directing the Medicine and Society program at Virginia Tech, as well as three years of teaching medical humanities at a medical school, in order to discuss how best to implement humanities learning for premedical and pre health care students pursuing their bachelors’ degrees.
Bernice L. Hausman is Professor of English and the Edward S. Diggs Professor in the Humanities at Virginia Tech, where she has taught since the fall of 1995. She is also Professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine in Roanoke. She is the author of Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender (1995),Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (2003), and Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS (2011), as well as coeditor of Beyond Health, Beyond Choice: Breastfeeding Constraints and Realities (2012). Professor Hausman teaches courses in medical humanities, medical rhetoric, theories of the body, feminist and literary theory, and women’s literature. She is a faculty affiliate in the Women's and Gender Studies program, the Science and Technology Studies graduate program, and the ASPECT graduate program, and was the founding coordinator and faculty advisor for the university minor in Medicine and Society. She currently leads the Vaccination Research Group.
This event is sponsored by the Humanities and Medicine Working Group, Project Narrative, the Department of Comparative Studies, and the Musicology Lecture Series.
