Queer Bioethics for Everyday Medical Technologies

Multimodal tools and systems form the foundations of knowledge: the design of the tools, systems, and databases used everyday form what is known and how it is known. The health humanities can be energized by integrating a humanities-based approach to these tools so as to help students understand the politics such systems enact. In this chapter, the author presents a how-to guide for incorporating technologies as critical bioethical method into course pedagogy, including a short syllabus. The essay is oriented, in other words, to help those with little background in multimodal methods use it in their courses in a way that goes beyond only the instrumental. It articulates how to use such methods as critical inquiry about tools and systems themselves, by centering its example in the intersections between queer theory, critical media studies, and bioethical knowledges.

Introducing Climate Change to Medical Students

This chapter discusses using a broad humanities perspective to teach medical students about climate change. It argues that the humanities can recover a more robust approach to bioethics and serve as a bridge between students’ professional training and their own spiritual and moral convictions. The chapter describes a short elective course taught to first- and second-year students at the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. It concludes with a class exercise in which students read the Physician Charter and write a short paper that takes one commitment from the charter and applies it to climate change.

Who’s Teaching Whom? Disability and Deaf Studies Approaches to the Health Humanities

This chapter contributes to health humanities pedagogy by addressing the social and structural dimensions of health and healthcare through the theories and practices of disability studies. It begins by discussing the role of disability studies in health humanities approaches to social and structural determinants of health, as well as the sometimes vexed relationship between the two fields. It discusses shared commitments to the pedagogical use of narrative and provides a case study of inclusive education in practice. This chapter represents disability studies critiques of health humanities as welcome challenges to deepen its pedagogy and practices. It also maps out arguments for and some basic approaches to access in the classroom, describing pedagogy that is accountable to the claims of disability justice in practice as well as theory.

The Power of Black Patients’ Testimonies When Teaching Medical Racism

Finding comprehensive texts that help instructors teach the relationship between race and medicine can be difficult. If medical education texts do include a discussion of race, it typically recounts some historical and famous cases of racially motivated abuse, such as the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” but not much else. After years of using medical education textbooks in courses, the author began to reflect on the message that textbooks’ handling of race must send to bioethics and medical humanities students. Given how little attention these textbooks give to race, a student could easily receive the mistaken message that racist treatment of black patients is a thing of the past or that racism in medicine must be insignificant and infrequent. When teaching medical racism, historical cases of unethical treatment of black patients should be supplanted with recent testimonials from black patients, to put a contemporary face on the topic. This is an effective way to teach medical racism either to students who will have interactions with patients or to current medical practitioners. The chapter includes an exercise on the feminist concept of intersectionality to discuss the many social and cultural categories, other than just race, that we all occupy to help students learn to see black patients as more than just a skin color.

Digital Medical Humanities and Design Thinking

Millennial learners live in a digital, highly connected, always-on world, where short-form, real-time visual communication is the preferred form of social engagement. For these students, the boundary between consuming and producing media is virtually nonexistent, largely enabled by user-friendly digital interfaces on their smartphones. These twenty-first-century approaches to interaction present an opportunity for health humanities educators to collaborate with millennial learners in reimagining health communication for the digital age. By engaging in collaborative, participatory design practices focused on solving real-world health communication problems between patients and health professionals, health humanities students can increase their digital literacy, enhance patient engagement, and develop valuable problem-solving and leadership skills. This chapter describes the “Medical Media Arts Lab,” a case study in using digital humanities and design thinking to cultivate twenty-first-century communication skills for future health professionals. It begins by describing the institutional context for the course, the Medical Futures Lab at Rice University. The essay then describes how to approach designing this kind of course and, finally, provides practical guidance on how to teach the course.

Medical Education and the Challenge of Race

Medical curricula in the United States have never addressed the racial dimension of American medicine in an adequate, let alone systematic, way. Medical schools have instead marginalized race and ethnicity as unnecessary for medical education. This chapter argues that medical students should understand the breadth and depth of the health crises in American minority communities. Many medical schools have implemented so-called cultural competency courses that are supposed to improve the interracial and cross-cultural medical relationships future doctors will have with their patients. The consensus is that this type of instruction has proven to be inadequate to its task. In fact, much “cultural competency” instruction actually excludes the examination of black–white relationships and other cross-cultural encounters and the racial scenarios that arise in medical settings. Medical students should be informed about the ways in which cross-racial relationships (doctor–patient and doctor–doctor) can go wrong and have dysfunctional effects on medical treatment. In addition, these often superficial, episodic, and underfunded activities tend to focus on patient behaviors while leaving unexamined the racial belief systems of medical students and doctors. The chapter offers two strategies for pedagogy to address these issues: interpersonal relations within the medical culture and the racial dimension of diagnoses and treatments within the medical subdisciplines that medical students study. Medical students should be aware of these habits of thought and how they can affect the diagnosis and treatment of minority patients. The chapter ends by describing the author’s initial course offering on the topic.

Moral Imagination and More

How do I attend to suffering and inspire healing in the complex twenty-first century? Medical humanities and theological education share this question as a matter of life and death. In this chapter, theologian and trained clinical ethicist Melinda McGarrah Sharp describes how narratives can illuminate moral dilemmas relevant to both health humanities education and theological education. Drawing on her training as a bioethicist and practical theologian and her teaching experiences in theological education, McGarrah Sharp frames pedagogical insights by philosophies of teaching and learning moral imagination as a significant way in to moral conundrums surrounding both suffering and healing today.

Undergraduate Education

In undergraduate education, the health humanities are transforming premedical and pre–health professional education. With a 266% increase in majors, minors, and certificates since 2001, these courses and academic programs are popular. As a result of changing emphases in the MCAT, US and Canadian universities are responding by offering interdisciplinary health curricula that incorporate the social sciences, humanities, and arts. Teaching undergraduate students is different from engaging with medical and graduate students since they tend to be younger and more diverse and bring less background with them. Undergraduates are more open-minded, have more time in their curriculum, and are in the early stages of developing professional identities, all of which are advantageous for introducing the health humanities. This chapter shares several lessons for work with undergraduates including talking about all health professions, not just medicine; not assuming they bring knowledge or skills to the class; offering practical examples; demonstrating role-modeling; encouraging active learning; enforcing accountability; and teaching less material. This chapter presents several sample assignments, such as Gallery and Illness Narrative Ethnography, to demonstrate different pedagogical approaches in working with this population and discusses popular techniques such as hybrid and flipped classes.

Using Podcasts in Health Humanities Education

The discussion of cases in bioethics education—especially clinical ethics education in medical schools—has been the leading pedagogical strategy for several decades. There are good reasons for this. One is that because time spent on bioethics education in health professional schools is limited, students need to be introduced to key issues quickly. Cases accomplish this, with the added benefit that this pedagogical approach is structurally similar to the teaching of other clinical topics (e.g., morbidity and mortality rounds, team-based learning classes, and standardized patient encounters). Another is that the dominant theoretical approach to teaching bioethics is principlism, which involves the application of principles to scenarios in clinical ethics, research ethics, public health ethics, etc. Sometimes the discussion of cases centers on “classic cases,” such as that of Karen Ann Quinlan or of Terri Schiavo. Other times the discussion of cases entails focusing on short, fabricated, and specialty-related vignettes in, for example, psychiatric ethics. But a problem with case-based approaches is that the presentation of these cases often seems too “thin,” and therefore the discussion of the issues raised by a given case may be superficial. Thus, other pedagogical approaches in health professional education have emerged in recent years, narrative medicine being one of the most prominent. In this chapter, a new approach will be introduced: using podcasts in health humanities education. This approach retains the advantages of using cases but adds the advantages of narrative approaches.

Moving Pictures

In health humanities classrooms, visual materials such as documentary films, photographs, and even YouTube videos often serve as accessible texts for the analysis and discussion of individual experiences of illness and disability or as evocative illustrations of issues such as access to care or end of life. Such works can foster empathic responses, sharpen critical thinking, and develop communication skills in health professions students. Visual materials can also serve as openings for students to critique the culture of healthcare itself and as opportunities for them to identify disparities, confront stigma and discrimination, and envision change. Thus, the visual arts not only encourage our students to see but also reveal to them how, what, and why they see what they see—sometimes prompting their action and often provoking their transformation. This chapter describes and defines visual culture and visual activism in the context of three health and human rights movements of the twentieth century—breast cancer, AIDS, and disability rights—that have all foregrounded the critical practice and political strategy of producing visibility and deploying testimony in forms such as documentary, video, photography, and poster art. It then describes health humanities methodologies and materials in three content areas—mental illness, trauma of war, and disability—used in a variety of classroom settings to enable critical analysis and explore advocacy and intervention. For example, students consider the difference between looking and witnessing, how visual images influence attitudes toward patients and impact health policy, and the balance between inciting moral outrage from exposure to images and inducing compassion fatigue from overexposure to them.