Department of English

See this coverage as it originally appeared in Penn's Arts & Sciences Magazine, OMNIA: https://omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/literature-and-medicine-heather-love-d...

Literature and Medicine

By Kristina Linnea García

An English course on narrative medicine invites students to look at poetry, novels, and essays that explore illness, disease—and, ultimately, what it means to be alive.

For first-year medical students, the White Coat Ceremony is a time-honored tradition. They receive the tools of their trade before reciting modern versions of the Hippocratic Oath, a text dedicated to Apollo, the Greek god of both medicine and poetry.

For a profession often marked by charts and statistics, medicine is also a deeply human enterprise, with doctors present for some of the most tender and harrowing moments of people’s lives. The field of medical humanities showcases this connection, something undergraduates recently explored in a course taught by Professor of English Heather Love and Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English.

Literature and Medicine, designed as a survey course and organized as a series of modules, begins with Apollo and the Hippocratic Oath and extends through the 21st century with poetry, novels, videography, historical texts, and guest lecturers from the Perelman School of Medicine and beyond. It examines individual illnesses as well as social epidemics, looking at how cultural constructions around race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship affect medical access and treatment, and how perceptions of particular diseases—as well as medicine as a whole—have changed over time.

More than half the students who took the Fall 2025 class hope to become doctors themselves one day. “It’s kind of stereotypical, but as a pre-med [student], I was interested in things that were medical,” says Rena Li, C’28, who is majoring in neuroscience. “I thought this would be a really cool way of exploring medicine that’s not the typical bio or chem class”—even if the literature in the syllabus is not strictly “medical,” she adds, citing the novel Severance about a fictional global pandemic directly correlated to poor working conditions and corporate greed.

The key to getting the most out of the class, says Den Somoray, C’28, is not to make assumptions. “I thought I would walk in and be looking at case studies,” she says. Instead, Somoray, who is majoring in biology, was surprised to find herself reading texts like Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Welcome to Cancerland: A mammogram leads to a cult of pink kitsch.” The essay, written in 2001, discusses the journalist’s foray into “the Cancer Industrial Complex,” which Ehrenreich says infantilizes women and commodifies disease with teddy bears and “sappy pink ribbons.”

Love says “Welcome to Cancerland” is a good introduction to literary thinking and that students are drawn to the essay because of its “caustic, funny, sarcastic” tone. In class, Love and Woubshet pick apart the essay to show how it achieved those effects through rhetoric, helping students to see the profound effect of language on emotion.

“You can just start with the title,” Love says. “Why is [Ehrenreich] calling this essay ‘Welcome to Cancerland,’” turning disease into a theme park. “It’s partly about being diagnosed, but also has a caustic tone around what it is to be welcomed into this culture that’s been taken over by corporate activism.”

Somoray says she had never considered such perspectives and had always looked positively on cancer walks and merchandise; she remembers questioning whether she was a terrible person for accepting that awareness events were meaningful without considering the affect on patients themselves. The class leads students to ponder such questions, to think about “your place in this world and what you do to others,” Somoray says. “Yes, we’re looking at a lot of passages, but it forces you to inwardly reflect on your own interpretations.”

In teaching literature, Woubshet says, “we try to teach our students how to think critically and historically, but also with fidelity to the art object.” For many students, it was their first college literature class, he adds, and he and Love wanted to expose students to poems, literary fiction, essay, and memoir, examining how different expressions suit different forms.

The modules on cancer and HIV/AIDS, for example, showed how people mobilized their own rage and anger to intervene more broadly in politics or patient activism, Woubshet says. As part of this, the class discussed ACT UP—the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power—a non-partisan group initially formed to combat the AIDS crisis. In addition to mounting protests in front of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ACT UP has historically had artist members creating extraordinary visual, literary, and auditory content intimately connected to issues of health equity and access, Woubshet says. “One of the things this course does is to historicize medical and scientific knowledge so students can see the broader discourse.”

The students also read texts pertaining to mental health, including Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill,” which discusses the connection between bodily ailments and mental health, and her novel Mrs. Dalloway, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “Yellow Wallpaper.” Meredith Daniels, C’28, an English and music double major, says these texts offered new perspectives—and that sometimes, traditional medical intervention is not what a person needs. “Connection between the body and mind is the essence of being alive,” Daniels says. “We talk a lot about how the way we feel in our body relates to the way we consume things, like literature.”

At the broadest level, the course connects the humanities and the medical sciences, Love says. “Literature does have something to teach us about a phenomenon that we’ll all contend with—which is being ill.” The readings from this course are “so relevant to so many parts of life,” she adds. “It is quite thrilling to be talking about this material with people who are trying to be doctors.”

In fact, Love keeps in touch with students from Literature and Medicine, and some have asked her to write their medical school recommendation letters. “It’s clear that this course had an impact on their thinking,” she says, though not necessarily in a didactic way. “It’s not telling you how to practice medicine. It raises more questions than provides answers,” Love says. But “they’re thinking about literal application of the very challenging readings we’re doing.”

When Virginia Woolf wrote “On Being Ill,” she was extremely sick, Daniels says. And yet, from her sick bed, Woolf made observations about herself and society. “Savoring life in that way was something I learned from that reading,” Daniels says. That’s what studying the humanities is ultimately about, she adds. “It’s learning about being human.”