Departments
Projects and Initiatives in Humanities
In This Section
Humanities
- Personnel
- Publications
Projects and Initiatives
- Faculty Resources
The Department of Humanities pursues scholarship to advance knowledge, improve teaching and contribute to the community on local, national and international levels.
The department's innovative research includes topics such as graphic medicine; vaccination controversy; child abuse; end-of-life decision making; ethical, legal and social implications of genomic research; nursing and nurse relationships; Alzheimer’s and dementia care and experience; and professional identity formation among medical students.
The department is addressing race and social justice within medicine and biomedical research and seeks to transform care practices, pedagogy and institutional norms with humanistic perspectives on illness, medicine and health in the 21st century.
The Department of Humanities also reaches into the health care setting to improve patient and provider experience with programs focusing on compassion and empathy, often using arts and music.
Learn more about some of the department's initiatives and programs here.
The Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine
The Doctors Kienle Center for Humanistic Medicine is an endowment that supports projects and initiatives that promote compassion in health care settings. This work has flourished with the support of many departments and includes ambassadors from throughout the hospital, medical school and community.
Center Stage
Center Stage enhances the health care experience by showcasing art, music and creative writing that calms, nurtures and inspires. Through Center Stage, we seek ways to enhance the well-being of individuals who come through our doors, whether they are patients, caregivers, employees or students.
Wild Onions
Wild Onions is an annual arts and literature journal edited by medical students and featuring creative works from the entire College of Medicine and hospital community.
Ethics Pocket Cards
The ethics consultation service at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center developed ethics pocket cards to summarize, in a clear and accessible manner, core knowledge about clinical ethics. We hope that these cards will be helpful not only to individual health professionals, but also to institutions who may wish to develop similar materials for their own use.
Graphic Narratives
Since 2009, fourth-year medical students at the College of Medicine have created comics as part of a course called "Graphic Storytelling and Medical Narratives." The course was developed to show students how graphics and text can be used to effectively communicate complex medical narratives and to help students develop their own stories into graphic depictions.
Physician Writers Group
Dr. Kimberly Myers founded the Penn State Health Physician Writers' Group (PWG) as a means of fostering physician well-being by providing a structured opportunity for self-reflection and creative expression within an intimate, open and confidential space. Small PWG cohorts convene on a revolving basis, and PWG publications regularly appear in major general and specialist medical journals.