Social and Health Systems 3

Social and Health Systems 3 (SHS3) seminars engage third-semester medical students with scholarship on health, illness, and medical care in a variety of humanities, social science, and medical fields. Students choose a seminar from a wide range of subjects (see current offerings below). The seminars meet weekly throughout the 3rd semester.

These seminars build on material introduced in the first-year survey course Social and Health Systems 1/2. In SHS3, students immerse themselves in scholarship on a topic of interest. The seminars vary widely in content, encompassing everything from bioethics, health and human rights, and writing narrative medicine to health disparities, global health, the evolution and production of knowledge about disease, and much more. All seminars share objectives, goals, requirements, and competencies common to the SHS3 course. Students refine skills of critical thinking in presentations, seminar discussions, and research and writing assignments.

Barry Saunders is lead Course Director for Social and Health Systems 3. Raul Necochea is SHS 3 co-Course Director.

2023 SHS3 Seminars 

Death and Dying in America
Mara Buchbinder, PhD

Controversy in Biomedical Sciences
Barry Saunders, MD, PhD

History and Ethics of Human and Animal Experimentation
Rebecca Walker, PhD

Psychiatry, Ethics and Law
Dan Moseley, PhD

Exploring the ‘Others’:  Experiences of Difference, Deviance and Disability
Sue Estroff, PhD

Performing Medicine — Embodied Ethics, Witness in Action
Marie Garlock, PhD, MA

Current Issues in Law & Medicine
Joan H. Krause, JD & Richard S. Saver, JD

The Ethics and Politics of Clinical Research
Gail Henderson, PhD

Gender and Bioethics
Anne Lyerly, MD, MA

Communication, Power & Medicine
Shelby Forbes, PhD

The Politics of Pain
Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, PhD

Global Health and Medical Ethics
Stuart Rennie, PhD, MA

Unfinished Journey: The American Struggle for Health Care Reform
Jon Oberlander, PhD

Writing Narrative Medicine
Terry Holt, MD, MFA, PhD