Much of life (and a good deal of medicine) centers on the ability to examine an object or situation visually and then describe it both orally and in writing. Join us in honing your visual skills and check out some of the world's great art in Chicago museums. For five weeks we'll go to two nearby museums (the Art Institute and MCA) where time will be spent on both individual exploration and group discussion of various works of art in different media. A final project will consist of designing your own JAMA cover with an accompanying brief essay.
--Christine Yang, M4, and Al Telser, PhD (Wednesdays; off campus)
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. Come along on a voyage to discover the truth of the Black Death, the 14th-century plague that laid waste to Europe for 300 years. Through the investigation of ground-breaking 21st-century historical and zoological research, we will analyze this killer's impact on European society, track the 600-year long hunt for its true medical origins and construct its disease profile. Students should purchase and read in advance Chapters 1-7 of Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan's Return of the Black Death--The World's Greatest Serial Killer.
--Diann Rothwell Lapin, MLS, MEd (Wednesdays)
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. Art can help in healing, and it can help in connecting all of us to patients and their families. In this seminar, students will work with a professional artist and with the elderly to create visual artists projects together. After an introduction to some of the conceptual and empirical work that has been done in arts and health, and specifically in the setting of aging, students will spend four weeks at the Museum of Contemporary Art creating visual arts projects. The goal is to connect to art, connect to each other, and develop an appreciation of how artistic work can promote healing. At the end of the seminar, participants will have the option of displaying their projects at the medical school.
--Tara Strickstein, MFA, and Joshua Hauser, MD (Thursdays, 1:30-3:30 pm; off campus)
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. Engage your senses and increase your responsiveness to visual cues. Through visits to the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, this seminar offers an opportunity to enhance your visual sense and analytical skills, as well as your critical thinking and communication skills, by observing art. After a week to get your looking skills warmed up, each following week will explore a different set of medically-related concerns including aging, body language and gesture, ideals of health and beauty, and diagnostic research. No previous art history knowledge is necessary and, in fact, it should be left at the door!
--Sarah Alvarez, MA, Assistant Director, Museum Education, AIC (Tuesdays; off campus)
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. To be "embodied" is to know in and from the body, from a subjective place. Medicine is a practice that, paradoxically, can become disembodied, objectifying the patient, the physician, and their bodies. Tools mastered by dance/movement therapists, such as kinesthetic empathy, movement observation and nonverbal attunement will open new methods of strengthening the physician-patient relationship. Through experiential learning, discussion, and readings such as Arthur Frank's The Wounded Storyteller, this seminar will move participants toward more accurate assessment, more effective treatment, and greater understanding of their patients' experiences in and from their bodies in illness and in healing. Please come dressed comfortably to move.
--Susan Imus, MA, ADTR, LCPC, GLCMA, Lenore Hervey, PhD, ADTR, NCC, Shannon Lengerich, MA, ADTR, LCPC, & Laura Downy, MA, DTR (Mondays 6-8 pm)
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. What do we learn from history? Using the rich resources of the Galter Health Sciences Library, this seminar will explore the history of medicine through the examination and review of primary texts. Students will choose a disease or health issue and trace it back from contemporary times to the 15th or 16th century, focusing on the connection between the literature of that period and what we know today. Each student will report on at least one primary text from the century that is that week's focus; at least one presentation will be with PowerPoint.
--James Shedlock, AMLS, Ron Sims, MA, Ramune Kubilius, MALS (Mondays)
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. Although Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) are preventable, few medical professionals are educated about them. It has been over thirty-four years since Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) was first described, yet a global denial about the safety of maternal alcohol consumption continues. The role of physicians in preventing and identifying the leading cause of fetal brain damage, FASD, will be emphasized. Guests will include FASD experts and individuals with addictions, and with FASD and their families. Two meetings will be held in local clinics.
--Lisa Thornton, MD, and Kathy Mitchell, National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (Thursdays)
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. Human lives are frequently affected by misfortunes, calamities, and mishaps. Calamities are truly horrid and devastating, mishaps are minor and trivial; some misfortunes are caused by other people, others are acts of God. What are misfortunes' impacts? How do people respond emotionally and physically to untoward events? How do people cope and fail to cope? What is the role of misfortune in medicine? What is the physician's role in treating patients who experience misfortunes? We will read verbatim recollections of disturbing events, coping, and physical and emotional symptoms as experienced by people who have lived through and with misfortunes. Readings provided in class.
--Alexander Obolsky, MD (Tuesdays 6-8 pm; off campus).
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. This seminar will examine the nation's health care system and the current proposals for reform. We will focus on the economics of health care delivery and on the implications of the managed care revolution. The seminar will also examine the roles of the state and federal governments in developing a more equitable and cost-efficient method of health care delivery.
--James R. Ferguson, JD (Mondays)
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. Through the sculpture of the human form and some non-medical pointers about anatomy, this seminar will explore ancient Greek philosophical and mathematical ideas of art, nature, and aesthetics and then see how these ideas influenced the evolution of pre-Christian medical thought. A portion of this seminar is an introduction to classical figure sculpture technique with a live model. Students should dress appropriately. (Class will be at Fire Arts Center of Chicago, 1907 N. Mendell, Chicago--3rd floor rear-which is 6 blocks west of the Armitage Brown Line EL stop; parking in front of the building.) Bring $26 to first class to purchase clay). Limit 7 students.
--Vincent Hawkins, MFA (Mondays; off campus)
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. "It is my aspiration that health will finally be seen not as a blessing to be wished for, but as a human right to be fought for." - Kofi Annan. Promoting and protecting health and respecting, protecting, and fulfilling human rights are inextricably linked. This seminar focuses on the relationship between them. We will examine the origins of health and human rights concerns and defines the ethical obligations of health professionals in the face of human rights violations. The seminar aims to provide students with an understanding of the link between health and human rights through readings and class discussion. --Annamaria Pastore, MA, MA (Mondays 6-8 pm)
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. This seminar explores the complex relationship among law, medicine, and philosophy at the nexus of major issues in the field of bioethics. It begins with a brief historical as well as theoretical introduction to bioethics as an integrated discipline, and then turns to reflection on how classic legal cases in bioethics have shaped the field and created the codes and norms that surround the medical and scientific profession's own understanding of their roles as codified in the Code of Medical Ethics of the American Medical Association, the literature of bioethics, and newly produced international codes from scientific societies. We will explore how public understanding of the cases is reflected in the science and popular journalism surrounded each case, and how the subsequent public response was enacted in state and federal legislation. Such cases and codes address emerging dilemmas in health care access, truthtelling, neuroscience, reproduction, genetics, death and dying, organ donation, and basic and translation research, such as stem cells, nanotechnology and genomic mapping. Limited to 7 medical students.
--Laurie Zoloth, PhD (Wednesdays 4-6 pm)
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. This seminar examines texts written amidst or about medical/cultural crises. Drawing from different eras and national traditions, we will consider the varied ways that literature attempts to make sense of and serve as a response to the sudden and destructive forces of mass illness. This seminar will focus on the literary experiences of bubonic plague, syphilis, world war, nuclear fallout, drug addiction, and the AIDS crisis. Readings will range from The Decameron to Night of the Living Dead, John Donne to Tony Kushner, Ginsberg to Celine-with film clips too.
--Chris Clary, graduate student in English (Tuesdays)
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. Do health care businesses have social responsibility or does business simply "do good" for public relations? This seminar will explore both historical cases and current dilemmas facing health care firms faced with decisions regarding social responsibility and philanthropy. We will use a case-based method to discuss hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, universities, and health insurance companies. There will be limited but essential readings from the news, and each student will be responsible for presenting one topic as part of a team. Executives from healthcare firms will participate in seminar discussions pending scheduling. No business background necessary; sign up if you have any interest in public health, health systems and good debates!
--Arjun Venkatesh, MBA, M4 and Sean Pokorney, MD-MBA student (Tuesdays 6-8 pm)
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. Certain personality traits have been found to be remarkably consistent in medical students and physicians. These traits allow us to be successful and happy in our work. However, they also can impede optimal functioning - professionally and personally. We will begin our exploration with descriptions of being a patient written by physicians with a variety of illnesses. These case studies reveal the internal and external factors that lead physicians to inadequately maintain their own health and to avoid seeking treatment when they are ill. We will then examine other areas of physicians' professional, personal, and family lives where our psychological inclinations can diminish balance and fulfillment.
--Patti Tighe, MD (Mondays)
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. Conventional accounts of medicine tend to present it as an uneasy mixture of "science" and "art" with the objective /generalizable /rational connected somehow with the subjective/specific emotional. In this seminar, we will read a range of fictions that represent various aspects of biomedical science, thinking as we read about differences concerning knowing and evidence in science and in narrative fiction, and about how these differences might work together in clinical medicine.
--Catherine Belling, PhD (Wednesdays)
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. This seminar is a spiritual journey of self-reflection, self-discovery, and growth-all elements of the important ongoing lifetime process for all those who seek to be true healers. Being present with and healing others necessitates our being present with and healing ourselves. We will explore the care of the spirit, our personal experiences of dying, death, and grief; self-nurturance; spirituality and medical healing, and the sacred in medicine.
--Kyle Nash, DMin (Thursdays)
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. A still unknown, yet familiar world of principled and patterned formation opens as we fold circles, exploring the information that is generated. The intuitive arts and mechanics of science combine in the geometry of movement to reflect a process observed in the natural world of a continually changing universe. This will be a case study approach to folding circles looking in the visible for what we cannot see, discovering unexpected in-formation, and looking in the finite for the infinite. The circle is inclusive, a comprehensive approach to exploring ethical interaction between parts within the whole. We will use paper plates to discover, recognize, and interpret and to make choices about information to determine the forming of healthy interactions.
--Bradford Hansen-Smith, sculptor (Tuesdays)
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. From Aristotle and Avicenna to Atul Gawande and Oliver Sacks: physician-writers have been around almost as long as physicians. Possibly medicine, a field that offers both scientific analysis and humanist observation, attracts practitioners who are uniquely suited to observe and describe the world around them. Or maybe it's just that the physician-privy to the hidden, intimidating and ultimately fascinating world of illness-always has something interesting to say. In this seminar, we'll discuss the processes and techniques involved in the translation of real life to words on a page. Students will read and write short pieces every week and submit one longer piece to be workshopped in class.
--Alison Christy, MD-PhD student (Thursdays)
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. Are you a writer who wants to apply your skills to issues of health and medicine? Are you interested in the social dimensions of health and want to hone your writing skills or develop a unique voice? In this seminar students will work independently on writing about topics of their choice, in the genre of their choice. As a group, we will read, edit, and discuss one another's work, with the goal of helping each writer to reach a wider audience through publication. Possible genres include the personal essay, opinion (op-ed) pieces, criticism (book and film reviews), and fiction (short story). Suggested topics include: ethical issues; access to care; immigrant and migrant health; women's health issues; the U.S. role in global health issues. Discover how writing--and amplifying your voice through publication--can be an instrument of social action.
--Judith Weinstein, MA, MPH (Tuesdays) | | |
