Histories and Representations of Medicine: Practices and Pedagogies

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Professor Jo Winning
• Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)

In this module we bring into play your role as an educator as well as clinician, asking questions about how past beliefs and views of medicine affected your own education, and how you might critique them to shape your teaching. We shall be asking how we can arrive at richly complex understandings of these intersecting roles, how to communicate them as ‘thick description’, and what forms of research and reporting are available for the reflexive processes that constitute medicine’s history and representation. Part of this will involve thinking about the way medicine is shown by lay people, as popular television and cinema, and the creative counter to those stereotypes provided by the graphic medicine movement. Another part will consider the roles space and place play in medical education, as the shifting locations and displacements of postgraduate rotations, and their relationship to the time-spans that delineate the movement from entry to medical school to the career grade. Above all, though, we shall be seeking new ways of understanding, researching, and expressing the complexities held by your relationship to the idea of ‘being a doctor’.

Indicative module syllabus

• Histories and historiography: writing about practice
• Education: philosophies, practices and communities
• In the field: history and education as medical practice
• Imagining medicine: heroism, comedy, confessional and intimacy
• Learning medicine: place, placelessness, movement and identities

By the end of this module, you should:

• understand the ways in which key concepts such as historiography, reflexivity, pedagogy, medical education, histories of medicine, learning in medical environments, spaces and places of postgraduate medical education are discursively constructed in different historical periods and cultural environments
• understand and value the diversity of different educational models
• understand how the formations of notions of learning, lineage and identity are located in contemporary medical education.