Undergraduate Forum on Medicine and the Humanities

May 1, 2009

Download white paper (PDF) here.

At the conclusion of the Spring 2009, the HRC hosted a forum to address the role and impact of the humanities in pre-med education at Rice University. Participants included five graduating seniors entering medical school who have demonstrated excellence in both the sciences and humanities and five faculty members who have served as advisors in discussions about the possible Rice-Baylor College of Medicine merger or have been otherwise engaged in medical humanities programming. This conversation resulted in a white paper available to all interested members of the Rice community, and has sparked fruitful discussions about the new roles that the humanities, broadly understood, might adopt in the changing Rice climate.

The faculty panel comprised John Boles, the William P. Hobby Professor of History and Editor of the Journal of Southern History, Marcia Brennan, associate professor of art history, Richard Lavenda, professor of music and chair of the Graduate Studies Committee, Caroline Levander, the Carlson Professor of Humanities and Director of the HRC, and Kirsten Ostherr, associate professor of English. The undergraduate members were selected by senior Bhavika Kaul, who had received numerous fellowships, including one at the Young Lives Center at Oxford, and had volunteered with several non-profit organizations that provide medical care and health education to children and refugees. Bhavika had been part of the Rice-Baylor pre-med program, and she now plans to pursue a PhD in sociology concurrently with her MD. Other student participants included Sarah Baker, a history major who will attend UTMB to pursue a career in psychiatry; Tommy Fu, a kinesiology major and co-founder of the non-profit Owl Microfinance who will attend UT Southwestern Medical School; Neil Parikh, an economics major in the Rice-Baylor program who also plans to pursue an MBA in health economics; and Mark Yurewicz, a religious studies major who will join UT Southwestern Medical School after completing an apprenticeship in Tibetan medicine.

Student participants Sarah Baker, Neil Parikh, Tommy Fu, Bhavika Kaul, and Mark Yurewicz

The undergraduate panelists all excelled in opportunities outside of the Rice campus, including study abroad programs, internships at the James A. Baker III Institute, and fellowship programs in international underserved communities. They suggested that an advising program structured around future goals, such as medical or law school, could help raise awareness among incoming students of off-campus opportunities and encourage cross-disciplinary studies. They further proposed that a medical humanities freshman seminar or seminar series would be valuable pedagogically. Rice already offers several humanities and social sciences courses that are of interest to pre-med students, and the panelists recommended strategies for making these classes easily accessible to students typically engrossed in science prerequisites.

The student consensus was that humanities and science education can benefit from enhanced cross-collaboration and that the humanities are increasingly key to reflections on the shifting state of medicine and current ethical debates in multiple aspects of medicine.