HOME | COURSES | MHS Courses Offered Spring 2010
MHS Spring 2010 Course Descriptions
Undergraduate Courses
MHS 202-01, Global Public Health
Instructor: Abelardo Moncayo, PhD
Global Perspectives on Public Health provides an interdisciplinary introduction to some major global health issues and practices in the developing and the developed world. In particular, the course will nurture critical thinking about global health challenges, strategies, and solutions. The course incorporates lecture, discussion, critical analytical exercises, case studies, and guest specialists from a variety of fields.
MHS 205W-01, Medicine and Literature
Instructor: Marian Yagel, PhD
This is one of our core courses: Examines the role of narrative in medicine, health, and healing. Readings and discussions will focus on what insights literature and the creative arts can bring to our understanding of medicine, bioethics, and the human condition. Areas to be covered include: doctor-patient relationship; metaphors of illness; stigmatization and suffering; individuals and communities in global contexts; epidemics; and medical experimentation.
MHS 225-01, Death & Dying in America
Instructor: Joseph Fanning, PhD
How do we and should we understand and respond to death, dying, and bereavement in America? This course explores our inheritance of attitudes, vocabularies, social practices, and institutions that cultivate and constrain our actions and thoughts about death. Influential texts and core concepts across a range of disciplines will be introduced and used to analyze and reflect on multiple mediations of death in contemporary society. The class will combine theoretical readings, lectures, discussion, analytical exercises, and experiential components. Students will also volunteer 20-25 hours at relevant agencies, e.g. Alive Hospice, and keep a journal analyzing their experiences in light of course materials, themes, and concepts.
MHS 230-01, Early Medicine and Culture
Instructor: Holly Tucker, PhD
Bloodletting, dissection, and surgery before anesthesia and antisepsis: What were the major questions surrounding health, healing and the human body from the Greeks to the late eighteenth century? Topics to include anatomy, physiology, childbirth and embryology, pharmacology, surgery, blood transfusion, and other healing practices in their cultural contexts.
MHS 290-01, SpTp: Health, Development & Culture in Guatemala
Instructor: Professor Edward F. Fischer, PhD & Avery Dickins de Girón, PhD
Health, Development and Culture in Guatemala (MHS 290) consists of three modules: (I) a 3-credit course in the spring semester, (II) 4 weeks of summer fieldwork and service learning in Guatemala (dates for 2010: May 12 - June 9), and (III) a capstone project in the fall semester. This course will give students a holistic understanding of the many interrelated dimensions of health, development, and society in Guatemala. Students will examine the history, culture and political economy of Guatemala, and then apply this knowledge to their fieldwork in a rural health clinic serving impoverished Maya communities in module II. Requirements: course is not open to seniors; preference given to students with intermediate Spanish; students must apply to program through the Global Education Office.
MHS 290-02, SpTp: HIV/AIDS in the Global Community
Instructor: JuLeigh Petty, PhD
Explores the medical, cultural, social, political, economic, and public policy dimensions of HIV/AIDS on a global level. It focuses upon HIV prevention and treatment strategies, social stigma and discrimination and the influence of HIV/AIDS on other aspects of society and culture.
MHS 290-03, SpTp: Risks and Responsibilities of Caring for Vulnerable Populations
Instructor: Carol Etherington, MSN, Douglas Heimburger, MD and Education Coordinator, Marie Martin
This course provides an introductory overview for interdisciplinary approaches to vulnerable populations with an emphasis on the evolvement of humanitarian aid and the risks and responsibilities in providing it. Students will analyze differences between acute and chronic crises, examining the geopolitical, cultural, clinical and practical factors that impact high risk groups. While the focus of the course is primarily on populations impacted by war, civil conflict, disaster in global settings, students will explore the parallels experienced by victims of trauma in local and national settings.
MHS 290-04, SpTp: Pharmacy, Politics & Culture
Instructor: Jill Fisher, PhD
How do prescription drugs come to market? What are the political, economic, and cultural factors that shape the drugs that are available in the U.S. and around the world? This course focuses on the processes of drug development and marketing to explore the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare systems. The course will cover such topics as the U.S government’s role in regulating drugs, the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to define the range and cost of drug treatments, physicians’ problematic associations with pharmaceutical companies, and patients’ identities as consumers of prescription drugs.
MHS 290-05, SpTp: Social Capital & Health
Instructor: Lijun Song, PhD
This course introduces the association between social capital and health. Social capital is resources embedded in social networks. It is a relatively new but burgeoning relationship-based theoretical tool in the health sciences. We will apply multiple approaches to social capital to examine the social production of disease and illness. The three themes covered in this course include 1) the conceptualization of social capital, 2) the measurement of social capital, and 3) various indicators of social capital as social antecedents of health.
MHS 295-01, UgSem: Epidemics & Society
Instructor: JuLeigh Petty, PhD
Epidemics are biological and social in both their causes and consequences. This discussion-centered seminar will examine the impact of infectious epidemic disease on society and the impact of society on infectious epidemic disease. We will discuss historical cases of epidemics ranging from the plague and cholera to TB and yellow fever. In addition to historical cases, we will examine contemporary epidemics and speculate about future potential epidemics. Themes to be addressed include how infectious diseases have shaped history, how social changes impact the evolution of microbes, the rhetoric of microbes, stigma and disease, the rise of public health response to infectious disease and tensions between public health and individual rights.
MHS 295-02, UgSem: Medicine, Religion, and Spirituality
Instructor: Marian Yagel, PhD
Research seminar: Explores the relationship between medicine and religion, and how that relationship affects individuals, families and communities as they deal with such life events as birth, serious illness, injury, disability, war and death. Sources include fiction, poetry, drama, film, and texts.
MHS 296-01. Independent Study. A program of reading and/or research in one area of MHS studies to be selected in consultation with an adviser. Normally limited to qualified MHS minors or majors. May be taken no more than two times, and not twice from the same professor. Approval of faculty adviser and MHS program director required. FALL, SPRING. [Variable credit: 1–3]
(No AXLE Credit)
MHS 298-01. Honors Thesis. Limited to seniors admitted to the departmental honors program. SPRING [3] Staff. (No AXLE Credit)