Instructions: Write a response (approx. 4-5 pages double-space) to one of the following prompts, drawing from our course readings and themes:
1. How have medical memoirs registered the high cost of medical care? More generally, what is the relationship between capitalism and the politics of care—including care that takes place within and/or beyond the official healthcare system?
Evaluation Criteria: You will be evaluated for following assignment instructions; your knowledge of the course material; factual accuracy; the organization, clarity, and flow of your writing; the extent to which you provide satisfactory, compelling, and relevant evidence to support your claim(s); your careful selection and proper citation of sources where appropriate; and your attention to grammar, syntax, and spelling.
course readings :
Damon Tweedy,Black Man in a White Coat(Picador, 2015)
Jasmine Brown,Twice as Hard(Beacon Press, 2023)
Peter Staley,Never Silent; ACT UP and My Life in Activism(Chicago ReviewPress, 2023)
Anne Boyer,The Undying (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
Selections from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nellie Bly, Martin Duberman, andEmily Maloney
Course Description:
Medical memoirs are first person narrative texts written from the unique subject position of the
author; they may be written by doctors, nurses, researchers, or patients. In this course, students will read a variety of texts that use first-person narration and a variety of other storytelling techniques for multiple purposes: to explain disease mechanisms and medical insights or innovations; to process the trauma of illness or the trauma of working within healthcare; or to illuminate the unique challenges of doctors, nurses, researchers, or patients. Students will work with memoirs of varying lengths and texts published in multiple venues
Course Introduction and Goals:
In this course, we will read medical memoirs by doctors, other health care workers, patients, journalists, and activists as entry points into thinking about historically significant, urgent, and deeply political questions about US health care. We will interpret these memoirs as texts that intervene in medical debates from a range of perspectives, and we will use them to provoke us into thinking about illness, the health care professions, and the experience of being a patient in their wide social contexts. Students will be given the opportunity to think, both academically and creatively, about medical memoirs and the issues of social marginalization along axes of race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability that they raise. We will, furthermore, consider illness and injury as forms of social marginalization in and of themselves. The course is organized thematically, with each unit giving us a personal glimpse into a particular medical issue. This course will involve writing assignments and presentations, and there will be ample time for class discussion. It is critical for your success in the course that you do each class session’s reading assignment before that particular class and come to every class ready to substantially discuss that reading
