At Penn State College of Medicine, Health Humanities is one of four educational pillars, along with Biomedical Sciences, Clinical Sciences, and Health Systems Sciences, and is integrated into all phases of medical education. Focusing on the sociocultural and affective contexts of clinical medicine, as well as ethical behavior and interpretive skills, Humanities courses prepare students for humanistic practice and enhance habits of lifelong learning and the development of curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking.
Phase 1 Courses:
Foundations of Health Humanities (FHH): Foundations of Health Humanities (FHH) serves as the gateway for Humanities learning at Penn State College of Medicine, providing a framework for understanding the social construction of reality and its impact on health, illness, and medicine. Social construction addresses the role of social context in shaping human experience. Beginning with anthropology and employing tools from history, literary study, comics, and film, FHH focuses topically on race, disability, gender, sexuality, and bias. With its small-group format and attention to the dialogue space of learning, FHH provides a basis for developing strong interpersonal, professional skills.
Observation and Interpretation (O&I): The purpose of O&I is to emphasize the power and importance of observation and interpretation in the practice of medicine. Practicing good clinical medicine requires both keen observational skills and careful reasoning. Identification of key pieces of data, recognition of patterns in the data gathered, and interpretation and reinterpretation of both data and patterns, are crucial components of medical decision-making. Learners will be challenged to refine their observational and analytical skills using works of art—mostly visual art and photography, but also brief writings—and to communicate their impressions and findings to others, a process similar to differential diagnosis.
Humanities in Context (HIC): Humanities in Context (HIC) comprises the entirety of the MSI spring semester. The course goal is to support the cultivation of humanistic sensitivity, which involves looking outward toward professional practice and inward at one’s own professional development. Living humanistic sensitivity requires the ability to navigate complexity and uncertainty. HIC is tightly connected to the care of patients and is more practical than theoretical. Toward this end, it uses first-person narratives, clinical vignettes, and organ system PBL cases as springboards for learning. Course content includes three primary domains: the patient and doctor as persons, power and privilege in medicine, and ethics.
Phase 2:
During the Phase 2 Clerkship, students take a course called Humanities Across Clerkships (HAC), in which students reflect on clinical experiences and explore how formal learning in Humanities can be challenged and reshaped by clinical realities.
Communication: The Communication course is the final course in the Humanities preclinical curriculum, spanning 18 weeks in the second year. The course is a practical introduction to patient-centered communication designed around a framework of 6 functions: fostering healing relationships, exchanging information, making decisions, enabling patient self-management, responding to emotions, and managing uncertainty. The course utilizes Standardized Patient interactions to allow the students to engage in deliberate practice with immediate feedback with patient-centered behaviors that support each of these functions.
Phase 3:
During Phase 3, all students should take a Humanities Seminar Selective, which is a month-long course with variable topics. Recent topics include:
Literature, Medicine, and Culture: Pandemics: This course focuses on four historical pandemics (plague, cholera, Spanish flu, and HIV/AIDS), using literary, historical, and anthropological sources.
Graphic Storytelling (Comics) and Medical Narratives: This course reveals how graphics and text can be used effectively to communicate complex medical stories. Students depict their own stories in graphic form.
Other Selectives focus on art as self care, writing and literature, poetry, human decision making, the history of medicine, jazz and the art of medicine, narratives of aging and other topics.