Medical Humanities Minor

About Medical Humanities

The Medical Humanities minor offers students the opportunity to explore health, illness, and medical care in their varied historical, philosophical, aesthetic, and socio-political contexts. Students and faculty bring a variety of backgrounds and aspirations to the minor. Together, we deploy humanistic methods to investigate enduring questions. What is illness? What is health? What does it mean to heal? How is disease socially constructed? How do inequalities of race, class, and gender affect the experience of illness and access to care? How does biomedicine relate to other forms of medicine? How do the answers to these questions vary across time and place, whether in the contemporary U.S. or ancient China? These are just some of the core questions that drive our studies.

The minor offers a wide variety of courses, ranging from the ancient world to the present and across the world. Opportunities for small-group and independent learning abound. The minor is structured to be flexible and students will find it easy to chart a course of study that helps them explore established interests as well as develop new ones.

Medical Humanities Film Screening: Nino

3.31.26

Undergraduate

What is Public Health Education and Why is it Important? What History Can Tell Us

6.8.20

Student and Faculty Showcase

visit our student and faculty showcase

The Eye: A Medical Humanities Podcast

Listen now to Professor Messbarger's new podcast, featuring recent WashU Medical Humanities graduates. "The eye is the organ of sight, and a symbol of insight, understood from ancient times as the aperture to the heart. In this show, we will look through the lens of the arts and the humanities at stories of injury and repair. While subjects will vary, along with the angle and intensity of our vision, we will always begin where we live: in the city of St. Louis. If we’re talking about cancer, contagion, gun violence, mental health, or abortion, we will focus here first, before we pan out."

Listen Now!

Forum on Medicine, Race, and Ethnicity in St. Louis, Past to Future Slideshow

On Feb. 25, the Medical Humanities Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis presented a “Forum on Medicine, Race and Ethnicity in St. Louis, Past to Future.” The all-day gathering featured dozens of speakers and panelists across multiple disciplines exploring how specific local histories, and the stories we tell about them, continue to impact the well-being of the region’s diverse communities.

Student Adriana Sanchez reads the Land Acknowledgment at the start of the day.

From left to right: Will Ross, MD; Mary McKay, PhD; Rebecca Messbarger, PhD; and Gerald Early, PhD.

Panel: Activist and Reparative Art. From left to right: Cbabi Bayoc and Simiya Sudduth. Not pictured: Aja Corrigan and Vanessa Cooksey.

Will Ross, MD, delivers the keynote address.

Panel: The History and Legacy of Pruitt-Igoe. From left to right: David Serlin, PhD and Robert Hansman. Not pictured: Candace Borders and Geoff Ward, PhD.

Philip A. Woodmore, PhD and the Phil Woodmore Singers perform gospel favorites in honor of Black History Month and in conjunction with the Forum on Medicine, Race, and Ethnicity.

Panel: Questions of Health and Well-being in the St. Louis Asian Community. From left to right: Harold Law, PhD and Caroline Fan. Not pictured: Amana Nasir, MD and Anna Crosslin.

Panel: Bodies at Risk: Obstetrics, Trauma, and Disease. From left to right: L.J. Punch, MD and Elvin Geng, MD. Not pictured: Vetta Sanders Thompson, PhD; Dineo Khabele, MD; and Sowande Mustakeem, PhD.

Courses & Requirements Resources