ENG: Engelsk valgfag 1 med skriftlig sprogfærdighed: Medical Humanities: Culture and the Mind in a Global Context

This medical humanities course focuses on the human mind and mental illness, exploring how the human “psyche” has been imagined and debated in different cultural contexts throughout the 20th century.  We begin by discussing the academic scope and institutional history of the medical humanities, looking to the U.K. and the U.S. where courses like “Narrative Medicine” were first attached to medical schools, ostensibly to help physicians learn empathy.  The remainder of the course focuses on how humanistic inquiry and disciplines such as literary studies, cultural studies, history, and anthropology, have shaped, deconstructed, or responded to key psychological and psychiatry debates.  Through these disciplines, we explore debates surrounding the roles of culture and power in diagnosis and healing, such that the course tethers itself to the English-speaking world but moves beyond toward a range of global contexts.  We focus on the transmission of ideas across cultural contexts, looking at how notions of mental health emerged in Britain, North America and their colonies; how they were constructed and shaped by socio-cultural and political factors; and how they exerted their influence beyond the medical realm.