This course examines health, illness, and healing across Latin America and the Latinx world through the interdisciplinary lens of the medical humanities and bioethics. Drawing on literary narratives, testimonial accounts, visual culture, ethnography, and public health debates, students explore how bodies, suffering, disability, and care are understood, represented, and contested in diverse cultural and political contexts. The course foregrounds how histories of colonialism, structural violence, racialization, gender, migration, and inequality shape medical knowledge and health experience, while also highlighting community-based and culturally grounded healing practices that challenge dominant biomedical models. Through case studies from Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx communities, students analyze ethical questions surrounding global health, medical authority, reproductive justice, mental health, environmental health, and the politics of care. The course emphasizes close reading, ethical reasoning, and collaborative dialogue to illuminate the human dimensions of illness and to recognize health as a site of struggle, creativity, and resistance.
Prerequisites: SPAN 302