Medical Humanities

The MA or MSc in Medical Humanities incorporates the previous King's MSc Medical Humanities and MA Literature and Medicine programmes. The course allows students to choose a broader range of modules within their degree, interact with a wider range of students, and gain a firm footing in the medical humanities by following common core modules. Students will come from a wide variety of academic and health backgrounds: biosciences such as medicine, nursing, psychology; from health law and social work and humanities trainings in philosophy, film and/or literary studies. They will develop skills in visual, bioethical, literary, historical and philosophical analyses of health care.

The Medical Humanities constitute a growing field of scholarship productive of powerful, innovative analyses of health care issues today. The chief educational aims of this course are to explore the foundations of the field and teach analytical skills that enable students to address questions such as:

• Does studying the humanities make us more humane?
• How are the humanities different from the sciences? What new angles do they offer on old ethical dilemmas?
• What is health? What is illness?
• What kind of evidence about illness does literature provide?
• What is narrative and how embedded are narrative ways of thought in health care?

Students who take this course will come away from it with a strong sense of how a variety of humanities disciplines conceive of health and illness and of the contributions these can make to healthcare. The disciplines involved include Philosophy, Literature, Film, Psychiatry, Art History and Nursing.

Centre for the Humanities and Health: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/chh Details of programme seminars: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/groups/chh/medhums