Transforming Undergraduate Global Health Education Through a Humanities-Focused Curriculum
Abstract
<jats:p> Global health needs the humanities today as medicine needed the humanities
in the 1970s. When new biomedical technologies threatened to undermine the physician
in their primary role of healing the patient, the field of medical humanities emerged
to rehumanize the doctor and revive physician empathy through humanities methods and
content such as close reading of poetry and novels, reflective writing, and critiquing
art. In contrast, many of today’s undergraduate global health students are plagued
by a surfeit, rather than a lack, of empathy to “save the world.” As the medical humanities
transformed medical education, can today’s humanities and arts, especially the new
fields of health humanities and critical medical humanities, transform global health
education and practice by igniting a “global health humanities”? This essay focuses
on emerging pedagogical and curricular challenges in nonclinical, undergraduate global
health training primarily in North America. </jats:p>
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22124Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1177/2373379919900534Publication Info
Stewart, KA (2020). Transforming Undergraduate Global Health Education Through a Humanities-Focused Curriculum.
Pedagogy in Health Promotion, 6(1). pp. 9-13. 10.1177/2373379919900534. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22124.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Kearsley A Stewart
Professor of the Practice of Global Health

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