As medical schools across the nation seek out more humanities-oriented students, Rice’s Medical Humanities Program grows more and more popular.
“There’s been a recognition for some years that it takes more than science to understand the human experiences of illness,” said Kirsten Ostherr, the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English and founding director of the Medical Humanities Program.
At the same time, Ostherr said, students taking pre-med classes have started to realize they can also explore complementary dimensions of medicine, such as how religion and spirituality intersect with health or how visual representations shape how we perceive illness.
That’s where the Medical Humanities Program and its minor come in. They’re already producing Fulbright scholars such as Julia Jung ’18 — a cognitive science grad who minored in medical humanities while studying the religious significance of disorders of consciousness — and winning grants for research that’s tackling important topics such as pandemic preparedness and response.
“Students see that there doesn't have to be an either-or: either you take a humanities route or you study science,” said Ostherr, who won this year’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service. “And they're starting to see that these things are very complementary and interconnected.”
The Introduction to Medical Humanities course has been waitlisted every semester since its inception in fall 2016. Capacity was increased in response, from 20 students to 35 to eventually 60 — and demand keeps growing, Ostherr said.
Enrollment in the medical humanities minor now stands at 71, while an additional eight Rice students each year are accepted into the prestigious Medical School Humanities Program. Unique among the university’s peers, the Medical School Humanities Program provides humanities majors with a facilitated pathway to the University of Texas McGovern Medical School.
“There's a growing awareness out in the world at large, and also inside of Rice,” said Ostherr, who has noticed that many medical humanities students first learn about the program directly from their peers.
“Also, I think the new program that we have with the McGovern Medical School was evident from the very beginning as a very powerful signal,” she said. “Because what they are saying with that program is we value humanities training, we value it to the extent that we are purposefully seeking to recruit students with those skills. And that is a stamp of validation that I think is hugely powerful.”
They’ve also struck up partnerships with other nearby hospitals. An internship co-produced with Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and the Texas Children's Hospital was planned to offer a six-week “medical problem-solving program” over the summer that immerses juniors in pediatric general and cardiac intensive care at the hospital. Due to the pandemic, the pilot program had to be postponed and is currently being conducted remotely.
Assistant professor of history Lan Li is teaching this semester’s introduction to medical humanities course. Her students love the fact that she checks in with them every time they meet via Zoom. But that isn’t the only reason they enjoy the course.
Li's class, two-thirds of which are pre-med students, are assigned a robust amount of reading and writing responses each week. Through these assignments and the guest speakers she brings in via Zoom, many of her students are exposed to questions and concepts they might not otherwise have encountered along a strictly science-oriented pre-med path: how physical therapy burnout is “destroying” the profession, for instance, or how the end of “meaningful life” is decided as a patient approaches death.
“Every single week, whenever they write the responses, they’re like, ‘This was so eye-opening,’” Li said. “I get that consistently.”
During office hours recently, one of Li’s students said how rare and enjoyable it was to attend such a large class with so many other pre-med students in which they were encouraged to discuss topics other than pure science.
Their projects also ask them to dig into their humanity, whether writing a comic strip about their own experiences with surgeries or conducting podcast interviews with loved ones about cancer and illness. (That podcast, Metastasis, is now an ongoing miniseries published through Rice’s Digital Oncology Initiative and distributed as part of the Medical Futures Lab.)
“And in spite of it being a big class, what's really important for the students is that they know the class is a safe space,” Li said. This allows students to ask deeper questions and to share their own experiences — which can enable future physicians to be more probing and more empathetic in their practice.
As the pandemic continues unabated, Ostherr said she’s been struck by how many physicians are digging into their own humanity in response.
Whether it’s music, art, literature or collaborations with people in humanities fields — something Ostherr and her team in the Medical Futures Lab have begun documenting with a Translational Humanities for Public Health survey — doctors and other health professionals are turning to the humanities to cope with the massive scale of sickness and death, Ostherr said.
“There was already an extreme case of burnout that was happening in medicine, but under the circumstances it’s been amplified to this degree that really highlights the limits of treating medicine as just a purely technical kind of undertaking,” she said.
“There’s a human toll — and it's not just on the patients and their families, but it's on all the people who interact with them throughout the whole caregiving process,” she added. “And then when you think about it, that's completely about human relationships. It's about finding meaning in life and in death. And that is not something that there is a scientific answer for.”