Humanities and Health Programming:An Eighteenth-Century Approach to a Twenty-First Century Conundrum Katherine Gustafson (bio) Newspapers and magazines frequently represent the humanities as a discipline under attack.1 However, as a college professor, I experience disregard rather than vitriol. My students enjoy literature, but many major in so-called practical fields, thereby reflecting an assumption that humanities classes are nice but will not be useful once they graduate from college and begin their careers. What follows is my experience working with colleagues at three regional campuses within Indiana University—IU-South Bend, IU-Kokomo, and IU-Northwest—to create a multisite, two-track healthhumanities program that includes a medical humanities minor. This essay argues that collaboration between health and humanities departments may move the debate beyond a defense/attack binary by enabling humanists to ally with and demonstrate to nonhumanists that humanistic study is useful, especially for students pursuing health degrees.2 Moreover, it asserts that eighteenth-century study plays a unique role in this debate by testing medical students' empathy. It is no secret that many students major in fields like nursing, business, or engineering for what they assume are better employment opportunities, and do so despite reports that corporations increasingly value employees with humanities training.3 This disconnect, Scott Carlson argues, may be because [End Page 371] such reports do not "account for factors like class, institutional prestige, and student inputs."4 These factors matter, though, especially for students who attend community colleges, regional state universities, and other non-elite institutions in the U.S.5 IU-South Bend, IU-Kokomo, and IU-Northwest may offer insight into such campuses. IU-Northwest, for example, teaches a sizeable percentage of so-called nontraditional undergraduates. As of Fall 2017, 30 percent of IU-Northwest students were enrolled part time, and nearly 85 percent of all students attended school while working.6 For many of these students, the choice to attend college likely entails financial burden and risk, and thus a major with a direct employment pipeline may be preferable to one with an uncertain future. This information can help humanities faculty increase their enrollments by innovating around student needs. In 2016 IU-Northwest faculty from the Departments of Nursing, Public and Environmental Affairs, Health Information Management, English, and History collaborated to create interdisciplinary programming. The group eventually partnered with other IU campuses to develop the Health Studies Consortium, which consists of an Allied Health Practitioner Credentialing Program and a Medical Humanities Minor.7 The Medical Humanities Minor is a fifteen-credit-hour program in which students take required introductory and capstone courses, as well as elective health topics courses in science, social science, and humanities.8 These classes encourage students to think holistically about health and dovetail with the Consortium's goals of providing pathways into health studies, encouraging students' empathy, and offering a center for community health projects. Such collaboration parallels a report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which urges universities to create integrated STEM-Humanities programming even as it recognizes the administrative barriers that impede such efforts at many universities where course schedules and graduation requirements differ by discipline.9 Administrative divides, our team found, exist and require a shared commitment to problem solving. For example, we learned that nursing students might avoid the Medical Humanities Minor for fear of adding coursework to their jam-packed schedules. In response, we asked advisors to enroll pre-nursing students during their first two years of study when their schedules were more flexible. Equally important, our team found that methodological divides between the humanities and sciences can pose barriers to collaboration. Nonhumanists, for instance, were skeptical that humanities courses could enhance medical students' empathy and cultural knowledge. Our team approached such skepticism as an opportunity to explain the value of a humanistic perspective, articulate the program's goals in language that would appeal to STEM [End Page 372] partners, design a research protocol to test our claim, and study available data on humanities training in medical education. This research found that humanities coursework demonstrably develops medical students' observational abilities, empathy, and cultural competence, skills that directly impact patients' health outcomes.10 In addition, this research...
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Oct 29, 2021
Justine Epinat-Duclos + 6
Open Access
