Interdisciplinary program receives funds

By Elizabeth Kassab

Daily Staff Reporter

The U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education recently awarded a $208,000 grant to a new interdisciplinary program to teach undergraduate students the relationship between health and the humanities.

"It's one of the most competitive education grants in the country," project director Jonathan Metzl, a University associate professor of psychology and women's studies, said in a written statement. "This year there were over 2,200 applications, and 6 percent of projects were funded."

"Seeing the Body Elsewise: Connecting the Health Sciences and the Humanities" will take advantage of the newly formed Life Sciences Corridor, combining the University's resources with those of Michigan State and Wayne State universities.

The project is still in the planning stages, Metzl said. Project coordinators will use the grant to outline and implement a curriculum.

Classes would be phased in each semester, and eventually students will be able to declare a minor in "Race, Gender, Culture and the Life Sciences."

"The new FIPSE project will enable us to expand our offerings in gender and health," said project investigator Sidonie Smith, a University of Michigan professor of women's studies.

"The introduction of new courses in areas at the intersection of humanities and medicine will also enable us to bring the perspectives and methodologies of humanistic disciplines to bear on the study of bodies, medical institutions and social constructions of health and illness," she said.

Metzl said the humanities are often neglected in undergraduate programs although they are included in medical school curriculums.

The program is intended to supplement traditional medical training.

The grant proposal states, "Central to our approach is the belief that disease and difference are intimately related, and that bodies marked by particular racial, gender and ethnic identities experience disease in specific ways."

Different cultures have vastly different ways of explaining disease, said John Carson, a primary investigator for the program and a University assistant history professor.

Descriptions of symptoms change depending on the culture, and attitudes toward sickness and disease vary between cultures, he said.

"No one standard will fit them all," Carson said. In the past, the standards for diagnosis and treatment revolved around the white male's perspective, but that outlook has changed over the last couple decades.

The medical community came to recognize that not only are people of certain backgrounds genetically more susceptible to specific diseases but that culture and gender affect the way people perceive health.

But Carson cautioned against judging specifically based on a patient's gender or racial appearance. Their dominant features may not reflect the culture that dictates how they view health.

The program is designed not only help the students understand their patients' attitudes toward health but their own as well. In the grant proposal, the project coordinators state that it is important for health care professionals to "realize how ethnocultural factors shape their own perceptions."

Through its emphasis on different cultures and genders, the program will hopefully "diversify the types of people who want to enter health," Carson said.