Humanities (GHUM)
GRADUATE CATALOG INDEX

616A Health Care Systems (3)
A definitive analysis of how the U.S. health services system is organized and financed. Includes study of primary, secondary, long-term, tertiary, and palliative care; community/public health technology and technology assessment; and insurance and third-party payers. The American health care system is contrasted with those in other countries, including nationalized systems. Special emphasis on the uninsured and access to the health care system. F.

680 Appalachian Culture and Health Care (3)
Familiarizes students with the cultural systems and ethnic characteristics of people living within the region, the cultural and multicultural contexts that underpin traditional health care systems in the region, and the interface of traditional practices and systems with modern health care delivery. Exploring such traditional practices as bloodstopping, childbirth customs, infant care, end-of-life customs, laying on of hands, and traditional family and community support modes, the course emphasizes the social and spiritual belief systems that underlie these practices. Class investigation of the Appalachian culture, both within and outside the region, includes such older cultures as those of Native Americans, Pennsylvania Germans, African Americans, Italian Americans, and Greek Americans, as well as more recent immigrant cultural systems from Asia and Mexico, and Appalachian emigrants in northern urban areas. While case study materials are local, students learn strategies transferable to other cultural contexts: how to obtain information about cultural traditions from patient responses, field interview techniques, how to ask the right questions and use the right language, and ways of moving people into the most efficacious system for the particular situation. Readings and field trips include examples of successful grassroots clinics that integrate traditional and modern health care systems.

690 Medical Humanities: Images of Health Care Through Literature and Film (3)
Studies how literature and film reflect and at times influence our cultural assumptions, communication behaviors, and social manners concerning the practice and culture of medicine, and how practitioners can apply the practice of critical theory as studied in the humanities to “reading” patients and situations. GIS.