Medicine & Society

Medicine & Society is taught in weekly seminars throughout the first medical school year.  This introductory course covers three broad areas: (1) social, cultural, and historical forces that shape health and disease, roles of physicians, and experiences of patients; (2) ethical dimensions of medical professional work; and (3) political and economic forces that influence the organization and delivery of health services.  Overall, the course teaches students to think critically about social contexts and conditions of health care and medical work.  Because the range of course topics summons expertise from a range of disciplines across humanities and social sciences, as well as from clinical medicine and public health, it is taught by a multidisciplinary faculty using a broad range of reading materials—ranging from family case studies to policy analyses to poems and short stories.  One culminating element of this course is a Health Care Reform Exercise designed to introduce students (through stakeholder role-playing in a Senate committee) to the issues and interests involved in U.S. health care reform.

The “textbook” for Medicine and Society is The Social Medicine Reader, a three-volume collection edited by faculty members of the Department and published by Duke University Press.  The Reader includes scholarly essays, medical reports, fiction, poetry, case studies, and personal narratives by patients and doctors—all revealing in some way of how medicine and medical practice are influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces.  For the Medicine and Society course, selections from the Reader are supplemented each year by other, current selections from scholarly and journalistic reporting on particular topics.

The course director in 2011-2012 is Sue Estroff, PhD.