Programme des Humanités Médicales

Welcome to the Medical Humanities Program

Students in the medical humanities program at Rice study the social, cultural, ethical, and historical dimensions of how doctors, patients, and communities understand the lived experience of health and disease.

At Rice, our researchers and students examine how religion shapes people's understanding of illness, how people think about death and how they think about what kinds of care they would want at the end of their lives. We explore aspects of history and race, and how the legacy of harm to underrepresented groups results in continued health disparities today. We look at the ways that social media, technologies like artificial intelligence, and big data analytics are changing how physicians and patients relate to and communicate with one another. We look at how this influences not just physician-patient communication, but also how people think about where health care happens, what it looks like, and the role that human beings play in it.

We hold a distinctive place at Rice as a school with a genuinely global expertise, engagement that reaches from ancient times to the future, and scholarly inquiry and commitment to real justice.

The humanities are usually understood as a set of academic disciplines that seek to examine and interpret the human experience — that of individuals as well as entire cultures. The Humanities at Rice engage in the discovery, preservation, and communication of the past and present in order to more deeply understand contemporary society while fostering the imagination of a new future. Yet, we also live and thrive in new spaces beyond the disciplines in our collaborative and interdisciplinary centers, programs and minors, which form the foundation for the more fully integrated and "connective humanities" we seek to expand.

This connective ambition aims to support cutting-edge research, to innovate and transform the Humanities undergraduate classroom, and to advance our PhD programs to national pre-eminence through cross-disciplinary hiring initiatives, joint faculty appointments, co-taught courses that conjoin disciplines, and a new infrastructure of support for collaborative research. This connective ambition extends beyond our classrooms to local institutions and publics that build upon the location of Rice in Houston and its ties to the Texas Medical Center, to the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and other cultural institutions, as well as Houston’s vast landscape of ethnic and religious communities.

We invite you to join us in exploring some of the biggest questions of our time — on who is at the center of the study of medicine; on ethics and morality in the face of disaster; on the place of law and politics in the future of democracy; on the digital arts that connect the arts and engineering; on the substance of real justice; and on the shape and consequence of a life well lived.