The Healers Art Elective is offered to first- and second-year medical students interested in exploring themes of humanity in medicine. Specifically, the course provides a space for dialogue related to the following topics:

1. Discovering and Nurturing Your Wholeness
2. Sharing Grief and Honoring Loss
3. Beyond Analysis: Allowing the Awe in Medicine
4. The Care of the Soul: Service as a Way of Life

Narrative medicine is the practice of using stories to understand health and illness in the context of people’s lives. Whether through fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, text or graphics, giving voice to the stories of patients and caregivers allows their experiences to be heard, made sense of, and valued. Learning to listen to others and to express one’s own vulnerabilities are valuable tools for all health practitioners, but they are especially valuable in the context of public health. The scope of public health interventions encourages practitioners to think in terms of populations, but efforts to improve quality of life through prevention must ultimately be grounded in individual lives. Explore how narrative medicine techniques can enrich the practice of public health, both through the power of listening to stories to understand how individuals experience health and through the power of telling stories to mobilize communities.

Introduction to the medical humanities and their application to clinical practice, utilizing a variety of humanistic approaches, drawing from history, philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, and religious studies. Engage with a variety of forms of expression, including essays, poetry, film, podcasts, music, and visual art. These humanistic approaches complement the science-focused approach of contemporary medical education by enhancing students’ ability to offer more compassionate and culturally competent care, and helping students build resiliency through using artistic forms of expression to process their experiences. Engage with the medical humanities through a different theme, such as the doctor-patient relationship, death and dying, or healing and wholeness.

Examine ideas about race and ethnicity and their relationship to the history of “Western” medicine and science. Analyze the role of social, economic, cultural, and political developments in the shaping of scientific and medical notions of race and bodily difference. Study how skin color (and other elements of “racial identity”) has influenced the experiences of patients and populations, physicians and nurses, and medical researchers. Discuss how conceptions of race have shaped both the health concerns and health outcomes of Americans in the past three hundred years, and the structure of medical institutions in the United States. Topics include the origins of racial classification, race and colonialism, the health and medical care of the enslaved, the use of enslaved people as research subjects, the history of racial disparities in medicine, structural racism of the medical establishment, race and reproduction, and the struggle for justice in health care during the past few decades.

Examine ideas about race and ethnicity and their relationship to the history of “Western” medicine and science. Analyze the role of social, economic, cultural, and political developments in the shaping of scientific and medical notions of race and bodily difference. Study how skin color (and other elements of “racial identity”) has influenced the experiences of patients and populations, physicians and nurses, and medical researchers. Discuss how conceptions of race have shaped both the health concerns and health outcomes of Americans in the past three hundred years, and the structure of medical institutions in the United States. Topics include the origins of racial classification, race and colonialism, the health and medical care of the enslaved, the use of enslaved people as research subjects, the history of racial disparities in medicine, structural racism of the medical establishment, race and reproduction, and the struggle for justice in health care during the past few decades.

Teaches students My Life, My Story interviewing and writing techniques. My Life, My Story is a novel healthcare intervention developed at the Madison VA hospital. Program staff and trained community volunteer interview Veterans about their life stories and write up a short story based on the interview. These stories are then reviewed by the veteran and (with veteran approval) added to the VA medical record to be shared with the veteran’s inpatient and primary care teams. The veteran also receives printed copies of the story for his/her family. The goal of the project is to foster a closer connection between VA providers and Veterans in their care.

Narrative medicine, storytelling and the medical humanities are tools that can help with personal statement writing, interview preparation, and professional identity formation. Develop the skills of narrative competence and storytelling through a combination of asynchronous assignments and synchronous seminars (approximately 1 per month) that will take place over the course of the semester. Reflect on the experiences that have defined your development into a physician and practice skills that you can use throughout your career to stay connected to your purpose in medicine.