Who’s Your Enemy?: Incorporating Stories of Trauma into a Medical Humanities Course

Abstract

This article discusses the theoretical and practical experiment of creating, promoting and co-teaching a medical humanities course: Medicine, War and the Arts at a School of Medicine in the United States from the viewpoint of the students who took the class. Specifically, it analyses how three themes emerged in students’ responses to the oral, literary and visual stories of war and trauma in the course and how they revealed the subjective and ambivalent nature of all medical encounters with patients. The conclusion is that actively encouraging students to view the role of the physician through the lens of historical and contemporary trauma enables them to contemplate the difficult question, “Who’s Your Enemy?” when caring for the sick and themselves.