Liberal and Medical Arts Immersion

This course will study the changes in definitions, explanations, and depictions of madness as expressed in psychiatric texts, asylum records, novelists, cartoonists, artists, photographers, filmmakers–and patient narratives. Certainly, madness has assumed many names and forms: the sacred disease, frenzy, hysteria, mania, melancholy, neurosis, dementia, praecox, schizophrenia, phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder. Those afflicted have been admired, pitied, mocked, hidden from public view, imprisoned, restrained, operated on, hospitalized, counseled, analyzed, and medicated. The brain, particularly the disordered brain, has long been a source of interest. This course explores the brain from the history of madness. The course takes a humanist, rhetorical, and historicist approach to the question of madness within changing social institutions and popular discourse. Lecture 3 (Fall).

An introduction to the subject of communication in health care delivery and in public health campaigns, with an emphasis on interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication approaches. Also covered is the interrelationship of health behavior and communication. Lecture 3 (Spring).

A study of the impact of science and technology on life, our view of life and of the value issues that arise from this impact. Lecture 3 (Biannual).

This course will explore the meaning of disability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course provides a cultural overview of disability and seeks to explore the social construction of disability, with special attention given to the cultural, intellectual, personal, and social histories of disability. Disability in history has been many (frequently contradictory) things: acquired at birth and acquired by war; a reason to promote eugenic policies or a reason to promote civil rights legislation; a medical diagnosis or a personal identity; visible in the body (as in the case of amputations) or invisible (as in the case of deafness); a source of family shame or a source of personal pride. How has the meaning and nature of disability changed over time? How can we understand the cultural meaning of the body in history? The course seeks to explore and explain these shifting meanings of disability within the context of Western history. Specific topics to be considered include freak shows, disabled veterans, prosthetic technologies, disability as culture, the history of eugenics, and political activism. Lecture 2 (Fall or Spring).