The Penn Arts & Sciences course Literature and Medicine begins with Apollo and the Hippocratic Oath and extends through the 21st century with poetry, novels, videography, historical texts, and guest lecturers from the Perelman School of Medicine and beyond.
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For first-year medical students, the White Coat Ceremony is a time-honored tradition. They receive the tools of their trade before reciting modern versions of the Hippocratic Oath, a text dedicated to Apollo, the Greek god of both medicine and poetry.
Dagmawi Woubshet (right), Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English, says “we try to teach our students how to think critically and historically, but also with fidelity to the art object.”
For a profession often marked by charts and statistics, medicine is also a deeply human enterprise, with doctors present for some of the most tender and harrowing moments of people’s lives. The field of medical humanities showcases this connection, something undergraduates recently explored in a course taught by School of Arts & Sciences English professor Heather Love and Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English.
Literature and Medicine, designed as a survey course and organized as a series of modules, begins with Apollo and the Hippocratic Oath and extends through the 21st century with poetry, novels, videography, historical texts, and guest lecturers from the Perelman School of Medicine and beyond. It examines individual illnesses as well as social epidemics, looking at how cultural constructions around race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship affect medical access and treatment, and how perceptions of particular diseases—as well as medicine as a whole—have changed over time.
More than half the students who took the Fall 2025 class hope to become doctors themselves one day. “It’s kind of stereotypical, but as a pre-med [student], I was interested in things that were medical,” says Rena Li, who is majoring in neuroscience. “I thought this would be a really cool way of exploring medicine that’s not the typical bio or chem class”—even if the literature in the syllabus is not strictly “medical,” she adds, citing the novel “Severance” about a fictional global pandemic directly correlated to poor working conditions and corporate greed.
The key to getting the most out of the class, says Den Somoray, is not to make assumptions. “I thought I would walk in and be looking at case studies,” she says. Instead, Somoray, who is majoring in biology, was surprised to find herself reading texts like Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Welcome to Cancerland: A mammogram leads to a cult of pink kitsch.” The essay, written in 2001, discusses the journalist’s foray into “the Cancer Industrial Complex,” which Ehrenreich says infantilizes women and commodifies disease with teddy bears and “sappy pink ribbons.”
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