Reading Guides

The experience of illness is both universal and deeply personal. Each of us will at some time become a patient, experience an illness or disability that may be acute or chronic, mild or life-threatening. All of us will observe the ailments and deaths of loved ones. Some of us—doctors, nurses and other medical professionals—interact with illness from both ends of the stethoscope. The impact of illness on us as individuals, in our relationships to one another and in the broader socio-political context, cannot be underestimated.

These reading guides provide a framework for encountering illness from a variety of perspectives and are useful teaching tools for instructors of literature, ethics, and medicine/nursing, social workers, and health care professionals, as well as for adult continuing education courses, general reading groups or book clubs, and individuals looking for deeper ethical, social, and literary readings of the experience of illness.

Reading Guide: Mental Illness

Are the mechanisms of mental illness distinct unto themselves? Or are they, at times, merely a broader expression of our complex personalities?

Reading Guide: Environment

Even as the world is becoming more aware of our impact on the environment, we often tend to downplay or even ignore the consequences of environmental degradation.

Reading Guide: Multiculturalism

These writings provide a way to discuss and dissect the complexities of multiculturalism, as it exists both within a medical context and within our lives in a broader sense

Reading Guide: Memory

From Marcel Proust to Oliver Sacks, memory has been both a muse and a source of endless literary and scientific inquiry.

Reading Guide: Infectious Disease

Plagues and Pens: Writers Examine Infectious Disease From Boccaccio’s Decameron to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, authors have long used epidemics of disease as a locus for exploring relationships between body and…

Reading Guide: Disability

Delving into both humanistic and medical perspectives of disability, the writings presented here attempt to confront stereotypes by addressing, explaining, and embracing disability.

Reading Guide: Aging

Perhaps because it is the common fate of humanity, the themes of aging and the passage of time have captured the imagination of writers from William Shakespeare to Grace Paley.

Reading Guide: Medical Humanities Part 1, Initiation

Patients
Doctors
Coming of Age

Reading Guide: Medical Humanities Part 2, Conflict

Disability
Coping
Madness
Connections
Family

Reading Guide: Medical Humanities Part 3, Denouement

Mortality
Death
Loss
Aftermath