The Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine offers courses and activities on critical inquiry of healthcare practice. By integrating ethics education, humanistic application, and historical context, into biomedical education, we expand learners' view of what good clinical practice can look like. In addition to the formal coursework listed below, we also support Davison Council student groups with ties to ethics, humanities, and history.
This interprofessional year-long elective, open to all incoming students at the Schools of Medicine and Nursing, will examine critical issues, moral decision-making, and change in the practice of healthcare. Students will participate in one of several small-group seminar sections led by interprofessional faculty members, as well as a portfolio of cross-group activities such as our Walks through Social History, medical humanities lectures, and book clubs/film discussions related to the course themes.
The Armstrong Humanities Scholars Program aims to shape young doctors as future leaders who are committed to structural change in medicine through addressing social determinants of health, regardless of specialty or practice setting. Program activities expand on existing SoM course content, enabling Scholars to develop advanced skills in medical humanities, ethics, and health advocacy. Some activities and events will be limited to the Armstrong Scholars Cohort; others will be open to the entire class, but with priority registration for Armstrong Scholars.
Trent Center faculty offer a number of classroom-based electives for MS3 and MS4 students. Interested students should contact the listed faculty member for more details and instructor permission.
MED 447C: Practitioners and Patients: The History of Clinical Medicine (section fall 82) – Dr. Baker. How has the physician-patient relationship changed over time, and what are its possibilities for the future? This class will consider these questions using a variety of sources from 20th century American medicine including medical memoirs, patient narratives, short stories, and other media. We will identify the critical historical processes (scientific, social, and cultural) that account for the structure of medical practice today, as well as examine the ethical tensions and controversies that have resulted.
MED 452C: Clinical Medical Ethics: What Would a Good Physician Do? (section spring 81) – Dr. Briscoe. What is medicine for? What standards and norms reasonably guide physicians' actions? This course will consider rival answers to these questions, and then follow clinical ethical cases to grapple with questions about: the clinician-patient relationship, the limits of medicine, the meaning of autonomy, the place of conscience and judgment in the physician's work, the difference between an intended effect and a side effect, proportionality, sexuality and reproduction, the beginning of life, disability, and end-of-life care
INTERDIS 403C: Narrative Medicine for Medical Learners (section spring 81) – Dr. Quaranta. In this course we will examine the intersection between the domains of narrative and medicine through the study of diverse representations of medical issues. Among the questions we will ask are: how does narrative give us greater insight into illness, medical treatment, doctor-patient relationships, and other aspects of health and medicine? How do illness and other experiences within the realm of medicine influence ways of telling stories? How do doctors' perspectives and patients' perspectives differ, and what, if anything, should be done to close those differences?
MEDICINE-454C. Humanities for Health Justice (section spring 42; MS4 only) – Dr. Mantri. In this elective, students will learn to apply the skills learned in medical humanities and ethics to the modern reality of patient care. The course will be a hybrid of seminar discussions and clinical/interprofessional preceptorship in the inpatient or outpatient setting. Students will create two final papers: one self-reflective essay examining professional identity and goals for residency, and other a scholarly research project, creative work, or advocacy project.