Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Minor
Program Overview
Bioethics and Medical Humanities are vibrant interdisciplinary fields that offer insight into the most important and cutting-edge issues within and beyond biomedicine. Health and medicine require more than just scientific understanding. Students in the minor investigate experiences of health and illness as well as the practices of medicine through social, ethical, and humanistic lenses. Exploring the complexity of these issues is crucial for all students, whether they plan to pursue careers or further education in healthcare professions, biomedical research, law, nonprofit administration, or the humanities. The topics covered in Bioethics and Medical Humanities will help prepare students to become responsible local and global citizens in an increasingly complex biomedical landscape.
Through coursework in the Department of Bioethics and across the university, the Minor in Bioethics and Medical Humanities gives students the interpretive, analytic, and theoretical tools to analyze central issues in health and medicine through an interdisciplinary lens.
Learning Outcomes
- Compare how human values and related behaviors regarding health, healthcare, and biomedical research vary with diverse populations and across diverse settings.
- Construct reasoned responses, drawing on major bioethical approaches, to complex bioethical issues and/or case studies.
- Identify the basic methodologies, theories, and approaches of the many disciplines and professions that interface with bioethics, social medicine, and medical/health humanities.
- Integrate multiple disciplinary methods and theories into an interdisciplinary approach to addressing complex, real-world problems around health and wellbeing, the delivery of healthcare, and biomedical research.
Undergraduate Policies
For undergraduate policies and procedures, please review the Undergraduate Academics section of the General Bulletin.
Program Requirements
| Code | Title | Credit Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Required Courses: | 9 | |
| Choose three of the following: | ||
| Perspectives on Health: Introduction to Medical Humanities and Social Medicine | ||
| Health Humanities | ||
| Bioethics: Dilemmas | ||
| Advanced Bioethics | ||
| Elective Courses: a | 6 | |
| Health, Culture, and Disease: An Introduction to Medical Anthropology | ||
| Illegal Drugs and Society | ||
| Health and Healing in East Asia | ||
| Independent Studies in Bioethics | ||
| Aging, Ageism, and Embodiment | ||
| French Connections, A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Medical Ethics | ||
| Comparison in Bioethics, Spanish and American Perspectives on Health, Medicine, and Culture | ||
| Death, Dying & Euthanasia: Netherlands & the USA | ||
| Dutch Perspectives: Drugs, Decriminalization and Detention | ||
| Death, Dying, and Modern Medicine | ||
| Medical Science and Technology in Society | ||
| Disability Bioethics | ||
| Philosophy of Medicine | ||
| Mental Health Ethics and Society | ||
| Literature and Health Humanities | ||
| Disability in Society | ||
| Bioethics in Environmental and Occupational Health | ||
| Bioethics in Correctional and Custodial Health | ||
| Christian Bioethics | ||
| Science and Society | ||
| Advanced Bioethics: Clinical Observation | ||
| Diagnosis: History, Culture, and Ethics | ||
| Ancient Medicine | ||
| Introduction to Health Communication | ||
| Rhetoric of Science and Medicine | ||
| Studies in Literature and Culture | ||
| Epidemics in History | ||
| Freud and the Psychoanalytic Movement | ||
| The History of Public Health | ||
| Race and Medicine | ||
| Ancient Medicine | ||
| Guns, Germs, and Steel | ||
| Women and Medicine in the United States | ||
| History of Medicine | ||
| Music, Mind, and Medicine | ||
| Introduction to Philosophy | ||
| Revolutions in Science | ||
| Philosophy of Science | ||
| Ethics in Theory and Practice | ||
| Bioethics and Armed Conflict | ||
| Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights | ||
| Health Policy and Politics in the United States | ||
| Health Psychology | ||
| Religious Studies for Future Healthcare Professionals | ||
| Body, Culture and Disability | ||
| Lives in Medicine: Becoming and Being a Physician | ||
| Health, Illness, and Social Behavior | ||
| Sociology of Mental Illness | ||
| Health Care Delivery | ||
| Global Politics of Reproduction | ||
| Women and Medicine in the United States | ||
| Total Credit Hours | 15 | |
- a
Additional courses may be added in the future to this list of electives. Each new elective course must be approved by Bioethics Department faculty director of the Minor and must have substantial bioethics or medical humanities content (greater than 75%).