Medical Humanities
What are the core values of medical practice, and how have they changed over time? What is wellness in a holistic sense? How can a profession focused on health help us to deal with death? And how can art and storytelling impact the patient experience?
Collegium’s Medical Humanities Project draws together faculty and students to explore these questions and more as they together envision a human-centered rather than problem-centered approach to healing through the Medical Humanities Fellowship Program.
Medical Humanities Society
The Medical Humanities Society is comprised of Medical Humanities fellows who have completed the one-semester Medical Humanities program, beginning in Fall 2022.
Click the button to see the students in the Medical Humanities Society.
Fall 2024 Medical Humanities Fellowship
The Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Fall 2024 Fellowship program in Medical Humanities. The program welcomes a small cohort of student fellows each semester to participate in a six-session luncheon discussion series held at the University of Pennsylvania.
The discussions will be facilitated by academic and clinical professionals including physicians, philosophers, psychologists, theologians, historians, journalists, and public policy specialists. Among the questions to be raised are: Why medical humanities? What are the core values of medical practice, and have they changed over time? What is wellness in a holistic sense? How can a profession focus on health and deal with death? And how can art and storytelling impact the patient experience? By the end of the fellowship, each participant will be guided to produce a one-page statement of their philosophy of clinical practice.
The 6 luncheon sessions will take place at the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesdays from 12:00pm–1:00pm.
Click the button below to learn more and to apply.
Previous Fellows
Spring 2024
Fall 2023
Fall 2022
The Winged Ox Forum
The Collegium Institute is proud to present the Winged Ox Forum, a community of fellows founded in Fall 2021 and devoted to exploring the relationship between the medical vocation and the Christian theological tradition.
Winged Ox is a biweekly dinner series bringing together medical students, residents, and advanced undergraduates for conversations about the theology and philosophy that suffuse and motivate medical practice.
This fall we will discuss the theological anthropology of medicine: Who are we? Who is Christ? What are our vocations as Doctors? How do we make sense of sickness and health in light of the Gospel? We will explore these questions (and more!) in a series of student-led dinner discussions.
COVID-19 Response
At the conclusion of the spring 2020 Medical Humanities Fellowship, students undertook a new collaborative practicum: to determine, with the guidance of the MedHum Advisory Council, how to allocate a small CI emergency grant for COVID-19 relief, drawing upon their humanistic training of the past semester. The outcome involved the careful distribution of meal vouchers in such a way that we could support local restaurant businesses, secular and religious nonprofit partners (including the Penn Newman Center), and the elderly and most at-risk populations of our local community — all at the same time.
Contact us.
Dr. Brakman
Faculty Director of Medical Humanities Program
sarah.vaughan.brakman@villanova.edu