The Medical Humanities program at Rice is invested in bringing humanistic research on health to publics in and outside the medical field. Medicine, and our broader conceptions of health, are important domains of inquiry and discussion for both healthcare professionals, patients, and people who aren't currently patients (but all of us likely will be some day).
On April 8, 2017, Critical Care: Disability Interventions in the Logics of Cure brought together Medical Humanities students and faculty at Rice, with community organizations, and attendees from UT Health, Texas Women's University, and other Houston institutions to rethink the nature of cure, care, and diagnosis in varying contexts of illness and disability.
The 2017 International Health Humanities Consortium conference was held in the Texas Medical Center, where scholars from around the world came to share their research under the theme "Diversity, Cultures, and Health Humanities."
The HRC's practica program enables Rice undergraduates to conduct humanities research in local cultural and medical institutions, and to couple this research with hands-on work that materially benefits the sponsoring institution. In our pilot semester, Spring 2016, two students worked at the Woodson Research Center, at Rice's Fondren Library, to explore projects in cultural heritage and the medical humanities.
As part of our Mellon-funded Public Humanities initiative at Rice, the HRC promotes alt-ac programming and development for advanced graduate students. The HRC competitively funds two sixth-year Ph. D. students annually, (applications due soon!) to work with local institutions as they complete their degree. This helps graduate students make professional connections in the area while developing their scholarship in a publicly-oriented direction.
The Civic Humanist Program launched a successful 2016 Medical Humanities event series this fall, hosting three field trips for local Houston high schools at Rice and one lecture at Sharpstown High School.
Marcia Brennan's Humanities of Care and End of Life (RELI/HURC 361) participates in Rice's new Medical Humanities minor. The course pairs the perspectives of medicine, bioethics, and the medical humanities with thematic case studies in art, literature, cinema, and visual culture. Dr. Brennan's students' final essays for the course have been published in an in-house collection. Limited print copies are available at the HRC and the Religious Studies department.