Course summary

Our MA Medical and Health Humanities offers you the chance to explore human health through the richly faceted lenses of culture and history, covering topics including infectious disease, diet and exercise, disability, and mental health and wellbeing. Why choose this course?

• This course draws together the diverse experience and interests of students and staff, working across different disciplines, different historical periods and different geographical regions, to offer an interdisciplinary approach to the fascinating, complex relationship between medicine and the humanities.

• It is ideal if you are interested in, or working within, health studies and wish to deepen your understanding of how patients and practitioners interact and how these narratives are negotiated in contemporary culture, theory and artistic practice.

• It gives you the chance to consider further how scientific and technological advances are constantly pushing the bounds of medical possibility. You will explore the role played by the humanities, and how the practice of medicine represented in art, literature, film and other media determines how we understand and experience our own bodies and the realities of sickness and health.

• The course has been awarded a number of fully funded MA studentships by the Wellcome Trust as part of its commitment to building an influential and diverse population of future researchers in the medical humanities.

• All Master’s students are eligible to apply for our prestigious Eric Hobsbawm Scholarships, subject to availability. One of the most influential historians of the twentieth century, Eric Hobsbawm taught at Birkbeck for over five decades and embodied what is central to our teaching and research: a continued commitment to critical enquiry and public engagement. We also offer a number of bursaries for postgraduate students.

• This course grows out of Birkbeck’s Centre for Medical and Health Humanities, an interdisciplinary and cross-College research group that brings together academics and students of all levels to work on issues both critical and clinical.

• a sophisticated use of written and spoken English

• an advanced critical ability in the use of theoretical perspectives

• facility and precision in the use of analytical tools

• strong skills and initiative in collecting and organising complex materials and writing up clear, well-presented reports or fluent critical arguments.

• medicine

• academia

• research

• publishing

• journalism

• healthcare education or administration

• community health

• education

• law.