Medical Humanities

Module code: 7AAEM660
Credit level: 7

The aim of this module is to offer instruction in the practical skills necessary to develop as Medical Humanities scholars, everything from how to read a set of medical case notes to using archives of texts and illustrated sources. The course is intended to complement the core course, Themes in the Medical Humanities, and it is envisaged that each skills session will last an hour each week and will take place before the core course two-hour seminars. The use of archives is a complex matter and a number of sessions have been set aside for it. Likewise, the writing of a dissertation may come easier to candidates who have the benefit of a humanities training than those with a science background so 6 hours have been set aside for dissertation writing workshops.

Module code: 7AAEM659
Credit level: 7

The chief educational aim of this course is to explore the foundations of this field by asking questions that are often begged: Does studying the humanities make us more humane? How are the humanities different from the sciences? What is health? What is illness? What kind of evidence does literature provide? What is narrative and how embedded are narrative ways of thought and representation in medicine? This course starts from the assumption that the questions Medical Humanities scholars ask are best addressed from specific humanities disciplines.

Through sustained exposure to the way a variety of humanities disciplines addresses questions such as those outlined above, students will learn methods for undertaking Medical Humanities research of their own. The second aim is to introduce students to the different ways these questions appear from the standpoint of humanities’ disciplines and the standpoint of healthcare. The third aim is to familiarise students with some of the main themes and topics of Medical Humanities research. Finally, the course will introduce students to a range of research resources (archival as well as bibliographic) necessary for the study of the Medical Humanities.

Module code: 7AAEM631
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module will explore a variety of illness narratives: fictional and non-fictional, by patients and carers, written singly or collectively. We will consider how far illness narrative can claim to be a genre in its own right as well its relation to other forms of life-writing (especially trauma narrative and testimony). We will also read and critique the body of criticism to which illness narrative has given rise, both academic and extra-mural. There are specific questions in life writing that illness seems to throw into especially sharp relief. Chief among these is the question of authenticity.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem631.aspx

Module code: tbc
Credit level: 7

Half-module

Taught by: Professor Rosamund Scott

This module addresses the law relating to assisted reproduction and the embryo, primarily in England & Wales. You explore the law on assisted reproduction and surrogacy and consider legitimate uses of the embryo beyond the reproductive sphere, studying embryo research / stem cell research / therapeutic cloning. These themes are united by the fact that the latter activities may stem from the embryos created but not used in medically assisted reprodution. You also consider some key underlying ethical issues.

Module code: tbc
Credit level: 7

Half-module

Taught by: Professor Rosamund Scott

This module covers aspects of the law relating to reproduction in England and Wales and in selected other jurisdictions, and some key ethical issues underlying the law. You consider the scope of the legal interest in having a child, or in avoiding reproduction or in deciding about the kind of child one may have. You explore the law relating to abortion, prenatal diagnosis, wrongful birth, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, wrongful life, wrongful conception and the sterilisation of someone who is mentally disabled.

Module code: tbc
Credit level: 7

Half-module

Taught by: Professor Penney Lewis

The question whether assisted dying should be legalised is often treated as one which transcends diverse legal systems. As a result, the important context in which individual jurisdictions make decisions about assisted dying and the significance of the legal methods chosen to carry out those decisions is often lost. You study the legal regulation of assisted dying in a wide range of jurisdictions, including those which permit some form(s) of assisted dying and those in which legalisation attempts has been unsuccessful.

Teaching staff: Dr Neil Vickers
Module code: 7AAEM633
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: One two hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This course is intended to complement the course in “Literature and Psychiatry from Locke to Freud” that the convenors already offer via the Literature and Medicine MA. It may run on alternate years with this precursor course or it may supersede the latter entirely. Its primary aim is to explore the explicit representation of psychiatry and psychiatric theory in twentieth-century literature and film. (Thus, this is not a course in the psycho-analytic interpretation of literary texts.) Although psycho-analysis has had the most profound impact on the representation of psychiatry and of mental disorder more generally in twentieth-century European culture, the course will examine a broad range of representations of psychiatrists and psychiatry (early twentieth-century neurology, psycho-analysis, anti-psychiatry, psychiatry based on developments in clinical pharmacology from the 1950s onwards, and evolutionary psychology). It will pay special attention to late twentieth-century depictions of psychiatry before 1920.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2012-13/level7/7aaem633.aspx

Module code: 7SSEA001
Credit level: 7

This module offers an introduction to the role of discourse in health, illness and medical practice. Discourse analysis explores social life through the analysis of language in its widest sense (including verbal interaction, non-verbal, images, symbols, documents). In this module, we will study genres of language including case reports, scientific papers, drug advertisements and media health stories, as well as interaction in consultations. There will be a particular focus on introducing students to relevant methods in the study of medical discourses.

Module code: 7AAEM651
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 1 x 3 hour seminar and screening


Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module seeks to understand the complex relations between medicine and cinema by critically examining the large body of fiction films that feature doctors and medical care. How have films portrayed doctors and other health professionals, and what does this tell us about societal expectations of – and misgivings about - medicine? What uses has medicine been put to in film? What kinds of narratives recur? Films are drawn from a wide range of periods, countries and genres – from Dr Kildare to Cristi Puiu ('Death of Mr Lazarescu') via Powell and Pressburger's 'A Matter of Life and Death', Akira Kurosawa's 'Drunken Angel' and Michael Crichton's 'Coma'!

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem651.aspx

Teaching staff: Ms Pat Walsh
Module code: tbc
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 

An important module if you are interested in the moral issues which arise in the context of medical practice and medical law. An introduction to the major theories provides you with a theoretical framework for the analysis of a range of complex problems in medical ethics. You develop a critical awareness of the principles and doctrines operating and learn to apply them in a systematic and creative way to some of the most difficult issues facing the medical profession today.

This module is a pre-requisite for all other modules on the programme.

Module code: 7AAEM662
Credit level: 0
Credit value: 20
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 1 two-hour weekly seminar
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 5,000 word essay

This module is the core course of the Literature and Medicine MA. It explores commonalities and differences in assumptions and methods of two distinct yet overlapping fields and provides the intellectual tools and theoretical basis for productive dialogue between them. The module concentrates on narrative and the various ways in which arrangements of information, encoded in language and/or gesture, can be conceptualised as narratives in radically different ways, for example, by literary theory, ethnography, qualitative studies methodology and narrative medicine.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/modules/2011-12/level7/7aaem624.aspx

Teaching staff: Professor Ludmilla Jordanova
Module code: 7AAH2009
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module is concerned with the role of visual and material culture in Britain from the Restoration until the beginning of the nineteenth century. It focuses on items that have been endowed with particular value, although not necessarily monetary. More specifically it considers the role of portraits and related objects that were prized because they were associated with significant people. "Significant" does not necessarily mean "elite" or "famous", rather it suggests the ways in which users of portraits viewed sitters who were important to them. Arguably portraits were a central form in which identity was produced, presented and managed in this period, and their use was far more widespread than is generally recognised.

We will consider how objects were made, acquired, exchanged, valued and endowed with meaning and how their historical importance can be appreciated. We shall also be concerned with networks, whether personal or professional, with gifts, with patronage, with artistic practices, with the things themselves and the ways in which they were displayed and used. Students will have a chance to work closely with images and objects, to think about how they are best studied by historians, and about the key changes that took place over the period with respect to identity. Thus the module takes gender, age, social status, marital status, occupation and so on, as issues that are essential for understanding the role of objects such as portraits. Students are expected to give class presentations.