Instructors: Elizabeth A. Carpenter-Song, Ph.D. and Manish K. Mishra, M.D., M.P.H.
2-Week Course for Summer Scholars 2024
Dates Available:
Session 1 - June 30 - July 12 2024
Overview
Modern medicine is in crisis – from concerns about unequal access and healthcare disparities to
workforce shortages and demoralized clinicians to rising costs of care. Being a leader in this
context requires a different knowledge base and set of skills than that offered by traditional premedical
education. This summer course is designed to provide advanced high school students
with new knowledge and skills from the humanities and social sciences to strengthen their
preparation for pre-medical education and their future work in healthcare.
All healthcare disciplines are dependent on humanistic inquiry. This course introduces students
to foundational concepts and skills from diverse fields, including psychology, anthropology,
literature, music, and sports. The premise is to prepare future leaders in healthcare with the “new
essentials of medicine” to foster compassion, creativity, and resilience in clinical care, research
and scholarship, policy, and advocacy. This course is relevant for students interested in pursuing
a variety of college majors and future careers, including students pursuing clinical careers;
students engaging with healthcare and science as writers or advocates; and students in the
humanities and social sciences who are interested in exploring lived experiences of health,
illness, and medicine.
Over the course of two weeks, students will be guided by experts in medicine, public health,
medical anthropology, and the humanities to explore the following themes: (1) Becoming a
Doctor, (2) Centering Patient Experience, and (3) Building a Future of Compassionate Care.
This course will be highly interactive and will use a range of learning strategies. Students will
have opportunities to engage in seminar-style discussions of readings and films, panel
discussions with clinical and community leaders, small group work, and professor-led didactics.
Learning Outcomes
Theme 1: Becoming a Doctor
Students will be introduced to the processes and experiences involved in the socialization of
future physicians. Students will examine biomedicine as a cultural system and identify key
characteristics of biomedical culture. By the end of Theme 1, students will apply this conceptual
framework to critically examine unintended harms within biomedical culture for patients and
healthcare professionals.
Theme 2: Centering Patient Experience
Students will be introduced to the distinction between illness and disease as applied to a range of
serious and chronic illnesses and life course experiences. By the end of Theme 2, students will identify and examine shifts in personal and social experiences that occur in the context of illness
(e.g., bodily changes, shifting responsibilities, alterations in perception of time and space).
Theme 3: Building a Future of Compassionate Care
Students will build on the previous themes to identify meaningful and effective responses to key
challenges faced by patients and healthcare professionals in contemporary medicine. Students
will critically examine specific examples of approaches in global health and healthcare delivery
science aimed at patient advocacy and support of healthcare providers. By the end of Theme 3,
students will gain insight into their own roles and responsibilities as future leaders in medicine.
Pre-requisite
It is required to have a device such as a laptop or tablet, that can access the internet for in-class readings, and assignments.
Instructor Biographies
Elizabeth A. Carpenter-Song, Ph.D. is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College and Co-Director of the Dartmouth Healthcare Foundations program. As a medical and psychological anthropologist, Prof. Carpenter-Song’s work aims to contribute to flows of knowledge and practice between anthropology and medicine. She studied anthropology at Dartmouth College (A.B., 2001) before pursuing graduate studies in anthropology at Case Western Reserve University (Ph.D., 2007) and postdoctoral training in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School through a National Institute of Mental Health Fellowship (2007-08).
By working at the intersection of anthropology and medicine, Prof. Carpenter-Song aims to apply anthropological approaches in the service of improving the lives of people marginalized by mental illness, stigma, poverty, and social exclusion. Through ethnographic methods, she engages closely with individuals, families, and communities to learn about lived experiences of illness, suffering, and how people navigate through complex landscapes of care. In this work, she centers issues of health equity by critically examining the high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail those they are intended to help.
Manish K. Mishra, MD, MPH, is a Lecturer and the interim director of student affairs and the director of professional education at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.
He is also the director of the new Dartmouth Foundations in Health Care initiative that links the study of arts and humanities into pre-health education for undergraduate students. His research roles include the development of shared decision-making tools, the creation of novel patient communication platforms in medical education, studying the role of ACO models in health care reform, and working on systems redesign in global mental health care. He is a course director in a variety of courses at the medical school, public health school, and leads several human rights initiatives with students.
He earned his MD from Dartmouth Medical School in 2005 and an MPH from The Dartmouth Institute in 2009. He served as a resident physician in the Department of Surgery, Department of Preventive Medicine, and Department of Psychiatry—all at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He has completed fellowship training in geriatric psychiatry and addiction psychiatry. Prior to medical school, he studied Sanskrit and religion in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University.