MINOR
The Minor in Culture, Health, and Medicine is open to all University of Michigan undergraduates. Its goals are as follows:
- to introduce students to social, political, and ethical problems
characteristic of the health sciences in a highly diverse world
- to build awareness of the crucial role of social choices and
cultural values in shaping both the form and the content of medicine
- to build awareness of the reciprocal role of the health sciences in
shaping modern societies, especially the nature and content of social,
political, and ethical choices
- to explore how these social dynamics (i.e. items b and c, above)
differ among the world's societies and cultures, including traditional
and non-Western cultures
- to introduce students to multiple methods for studying
boundary-spanning problems and to the advantages and limitations of each of these methods.
Recently, there have been numerous calls from both within and outside
of medicine for health-care professionals to become more aware of cultural
differences. Yet current efforts to promote understandings of the cultural
and cross-cultural aspects of medicine suffer from two important
limitations. First, these interventions begin too late in the education
process, and are rarely components of pre-health undergraduate education.
Second, when cultural diversity does appear in the curriculum, it is
defined through disease. Central to our approach is the belief that
disease and difference are intimately related, and that bodies marked by
particular racial, gender, and ethnic identities experience disease in
specific ways. We thus believe that students from the undergraduate level
on up need to learn about cultures at they same time that they begin to
learn about diseases and bodies.
For pre-medical students, this minor would complement their chosen
field. For others, this minor would permit the exploration of life science
issues usually ignored by non-technical disciplines.
PREREQUISITES
None. This minor is open to all University of Michigan undergraduates.
This policy does not relieve students of the necessity to take any
prerequisites required for individual courses.
DESCRIPTION AND REQUIREMENTS
The Race, Gender, Culture, and the Life Sciences Minor requires a
minimum of five courses for at least 17 credits. Requirements are as
follows:
- Core Course - The core course may be taken at any time, but students
will be encouraged to take it in their sophomore or junior year.
(Minimum of one of the following core courses.)
- Women, Autobiography, and the Medical Body (Sidone Smith)
- Health and Illness in African Worlds (Nancy Hunt)
- Raced Bodies, Gendered Moods: Cultural Histories of
Psychopharmacology (Jonathan Metzl, John Carson)
- Medicine, Literature, and the Diagnostic Dialogue (Silke Maria
Weineck)
- Interdisciplinary Approaches to Men's Health (Timothy Johnson,
Jonathan Metzl)
- Medicine, Race, and Culture (Steve Rachman)
- Electives - A list of electives will be developed shortly. (Minimum of 3 courses for at least 10 credits.)
- A maximum of one elective at the 100 level is permitted (up to 4 credits).
- The remaining elective credits must be at the 200 level or above.
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