Oral History and the Stories of Medicine
Oral histories begin with the spoken accounts of people who lived through significant events and experiences. These accounts provide valuable perspectives that might not be included in already-written histories. In this course, we will explore several histories of medicine by studying interviews collected by oral historians and incorporating them into written assignments. We will also do the work of oral history ourselves: students will conduct oral history interviews with physicians and other medical providers in the communities surrounding Duke.
Through these interviews we will examine medicine: a complex concept that is often recorded in writing but is also a lived experience. By working with oral histories as primary sources for written accounts, we will investigate the many relationships between what is witnessed and what becomes part of the written record. We will also consider the many ways that the doing of medicine leads to the telling of medicine…and how that telling in turn influences the doing.
Your writing projects for this course will include several short essays, reflecting on weekly readings that explain practices of oral history and of medicine. These shorter assignments are designed to help you identify the main arguments of a text and incorporate those arguments into your own work. Two longer essays will require library research and fieldwork in order to create documents that engage critically with aspects of both writing and medicine.
The first of these two longer essays will incorporate existing oral histories of medicine; we will consult collections as close as Duke and as far away as the National Library of Medicine; other online sources might take us even farther. In a second project, interviews conducted by teams of students will become the basis of an essay offering a written history focused on a particular event, practice, or experience of medicine. To encourage your understanding of the process of revising and editing in academic writing, you will create multiple drafts of all graded work and receive feedback from your peers and from your instructor.
Students interested generally in the relationship between the spoken and the written word are more than welcome, as are students interested in medicine, oral history, and documentary studies. Please note that this course addresses medicine from an arts and humanities perspective.
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