Introduction to Medical Humanities Student Unessay Projects (Fall 2021)

This is a website examining mother-daughter relationships through the lens of depression. My overall goal was to give a brief overview of common experiences among parents and children with depression and then illuminate the experiences of both mothers and children having depression through my family’s story. I ended up taking sections from each of our individual writing and weaving it into a conversation in order to give each person their own voice.

The project is a recreation of US military medic kits. It shows the evolution of the United States’s military medical kits, focusing on the World Wars period. The main material of the project was a model of the M2 Jungle Med kit, which was issued to every soldier in the later years of WWII. Every item in this med kit was recreated by hand and assigned a description, as each item represented a need the armed forces needed in a previous conflict.

The project is a coloring book of diagrams of medical technologies.
Siona chose to depict medical technologies at various key moments in their development and evolution to show how their physical forms evolved alongside their use and role in the practice of medicine. For her, annotated diagrams are a powerful way to learn about something new and convey information, and thus selected to format her research on the relationship between technology and medicine in this manner.

This is a curriculum for students on antebellum plantation medicine as well as the indigenous practices of enslaved people of West African descent.

This is a photographic essay portraying the written experiences of those who lived during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. The project also offers a commentary on government intervention and health officials’ reception of the general public’s most pressing concerns.

This project is a recreated 1820s apothecary chest for a colonial physician in British India that Evan built. He did extensive research on historically accurate remedies and substances in order to create this final project, and wrote fictional diary entries for a fictional colonial physician that accompanies the apothecary chest.

This project is a visual representation of prevalent beliefs and attitudes surrounding cervical cancer and screening in Southern India. The goal of the project was to highlight these beliefs and investigate how they have contributed to lower screening rates and consequentially higher rates of cervical cancer mortality.

The project is a series of art and narratives in which Amy translated her experiences as a medical tech working on the Georgetown University Cardiac ICU ward with LVAD (left ventricular assist device) patients. Accompanying her art, she wrote parallel medical charts and patient pathographies, showing the distinctions between what makes it into the medical record vs the patient phenomenological experience.

This is an original detective story featuring Traditional Vietnamese Medicine. The overall purpose of writing a detective story is to help create a space to talk about traditional Vietnamese medicine in the context of the Vietnamese American identity. I purposely tried to deconstruct the typical detective story in order to make this space.

This project explores the usage and role of plants or plant-based materials in the embalming and mummification processes. The project aims to answer: to what extent are plants used in the mummification process in the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt? And what purpose do these plant-based materials serve in the mummification process?

Podcast on college student experiences of COVID. The project explores how COVID-19 has shifted the “normal” college illness narratives through the way it introduces the new COVID illness narrative, and how it has shown to exacerbate the experiences of some illnesses that college students already have. This project is meant to frame college students in a different light as we are mainly framed as vectors of the virus instead of victims of this virus. It is my hope to show that not all college students are just partying hard and not caring about the effects of the virus.

Distancing and Disfigurement is a virtual museum exhibit examining the historical and cultural experiences of disfigurement in individuals and communities. The collection of works strives to show that while the context of disfigurement can change — whether caused by leprosy or breast cancer or transformed into a public spectacle — one thing remains the constant: the distance held between the ‘normal’ public and the ‘abnormal,’ marked body.