The Birgit Rausing Centre for Medical Humanities has several ongoing educational assignments and is developing new courses at Lund University.
Since 2008, medical humanities has been included as an elective course at the medical programme at Lund University and as course elements and seminars in semesters 4, 6, 8 and 9. Medical students also have the opportunity to write essays and degree projects in medical humanities in semesters 5 and 10. The medical programme (and our educational initiatives) is given in Swedish and information about both the course and the programme is sadly only available in Swedish. The same goes for the overwhelming course evaluations our brilliant teachers have gotten over the years.
One of them – the pioneer – professor Anders Palm, you met before, here and we’ve also written about his fundamental value for Birgit Rausing Centre here.
The other one is our current co-centre-director, associate professor, Katarina Bernhardsson. She is the one planning the courses, administrating and counselling, leading course elements and introducing (guest) lecturers and supervisors. Let’s just say she’s basically in charge of everything. And the students love her for this and her never failing commitment to them and to her subject.
We often ask her to “do her thing” – rooted in what is called narratives in medicine – with other teachers at the Medical Faculty, with representatives outside academia (within healthcare mostly) and with interdisciplinary research groups, locally and nationally. The impact is immediate and almost tangible. If you ever wonder what medical humanities can do for you (and others), have Katarina come over and wonder no more.
And now we want to do research on past achievements. Katarina Bernhardsson, Anders Palm, Chistopher Mathieu, Lars Hagander and Alexander Tejera are all involved in a major alumni-project, hitting the in-boxes, mailboxes and LinkedIn-messenger-boxes of hundreds of former medical students as we speak.