On Monday, April 5, Elizabethtown College was approved to offer a new minor aimed towards helping students wishing to work in the medical field. The College will begin to offer a minor in medical humanities for students who wish to go to medical school post-Etown.
Medical humanities is a form of medical practice that looks more into who the person is instead of focusing on the biology and health of a patient. The intent is to ethically learn more about the person’s history and their life to find what could be causing certain health conditions to arise.
Due to this, medical humanities is based on the ideas of narrative medicine. This is because the patient will tell what has happened in their life and how it has impacted them. This practice is needed because people usually leave out information when explaining their story.
The minor will teach medical students what to look for in these situations to accurately assist their patients. Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities Dr. Kevin Shorner-Johnson believes that this minor will be very beneficial to students.
“It fills a need that our students have told us that they really want deeper studies that might make them better practitioners in the field,” Shorner-Johnson said.
This was decided to be a minor due to how many credits are taken in majors that would usually benefit from this minor. Those majors usually require loads of credits that would make it very difficult to add medical humanities as a dual major.
“You know, it’s meant to support, in particular OT majors, music therapy majors, physician’s assistant majors [and] biology majors who may be thinking about medical school down the road,” Shorner-Johnson said. He explained that chemistry majors could also be a benefitting group. “Those particular people have very credit intensive majors that oftentimes don’t allow them to add on a second major,” he said.
Students intending to go into the medical field also believe the minor to be a good addition. Junior biology major Alex Petrocelli believes it to be a great addition to the curriculum and a huge benefit to students. He also said that he would’ve taken it as a minor if it was available during his first year.
The minor had also gained a lot of interest by students of other majors as well. A poll was conducted at Etown amongst various science majors to gauge interest on the minor, which reported that 74.2 percent of the 98 responding students said they would be interested.
A few of the courses intended to be taught within the minor include ethics, religious studies, cultural studies and narrative medicine. All of these are core elements of medical humanities and are intended to be taught within this minor.
One of the professors on campus that will be teaching some of these courses is Dr. Vanessa Borilot. Borilot teaches French and gender studies, which are both beneficial to the ideas medical humanities uses.
“[Borilot is] going to be teaching the introduction course, and she’s going to be teaching the closure course. Her expertise area is kind of at the intersection of race, trauma and gender studies,” Shorner-Johnson said.
He also said that Borilot looked at literature about how people express and experienced trauma to prepare for teaching these courses.
There will be a conference over the summer to discuss and plan out how the minor will be used in schools in the Central Pennsylvania area. Penn State, Lebanon Valley College and Franklin and Marshall will also be at the conference. Director of McGovern Center’s Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration Dr. Keisha Ray will be the keynote speaker during these conferences.
