Healing Through the Ages: Introduction to Medical Humanities Explores the History Collections
How have people understood illness, healing, and the human body throughout history and what happens when beliefs about medicine intersect with religion, culture, nature, and society?
For students in Dr. Erin Prophet’s RELI 1200: Introduction to the Medical Humanities class, these questions are at the heart of the course, and the Laupus Health Sciences Library History Collections offered a chance to explore them through original historical sources this September.
Medicine Through a Humanistic Lens
The medical humanities draw upon disciplines including history, literature, the arts, philosophy, and religious studies to examine the context and experience of medicine. In this course, students are asked to consider how social and cultural factors influence health care and to recognize differences among cultural approaches to health and medicine. Their particular assignment for this day was to choose an exhibit or artifact from the History Collections that they can use to discuss these differences and changes. Instead of interacting with the history of medicine solely through secondary sources, students can examine the original books, documents, and objects through which people recorded and practiced healing.
History Collections Coordinator Katelyn Rollins discusses the Emma Sandberg Midwife Papers
During their visit, students explored rare books covering subjects including botany, folk medicine, magic, and anatomy. Together, these materials illustrate the diverse ways people have sought to understand the natural world, the human body, illness, and the process of healing.
Archivist Mollie Frazier explains the intersection of religion and science in ‘Johann Remmelin’s Anatomical ‘Flap’ Book’ (1619)
The Practice of Medicine
Students also examined archival materials documenting country doctors and medical practices, bringing the discussion from historical ideas about medicine to the lived experience of providing care.
Archives from our Country Doctor Museum Collection
Archives from our Country Doctor Museum Collection
These records offer glimpses into the everyday practice of medicine and the relationships between healthcare providers and the communities they served. They also showed the real-world settings and how those practices were shaped by time, place, resources, and cultural beliefs.
Mollie discussing our NC Health History in Images exhibit on Laupus Library’s 2nd floor.
Learning from Primary Sources
Working directly with historical materials encourages students to think critically about the relationship between beliefs about health, social structures, and health outcomes, which is one of the learning objectives of RELI 1200. The course also asks students to recognize different cultural approaches to health and medicine and to examine the social and cultural dimensions of medical care.
For the History Collections, visits like this demonstrate the value of primary sources in interdisciplinary teaching. A rare book, a medical artifact, or an archival record can serve as a starting point for conversations that extend well beyond the history of medicine itself.
Connecting the Classroom and the Collections
This visit was part of an ongoing collaboration between Dr. Prophet’s Introduction to the Medical Humanities course and the Laupus Library History Collections, providing a new group of students with an opportunity to encounter the history of medicine firsthand.
Through these experiences, students can see medicine not simply as a body of scientific knowledge, but as a human endeavor shaped by history, culture, belief, ethics, and lived experience.
The History Collections welcomes ECU faculty and students interested in incorporating primary sources into their teaching and learning. Class visits can be tailored to course topics, assignments, and areas of interest.
We are grateful to Dr. Prophet and her students for spending time in the History Collections and for exploring the many ways history can help us understand medicine, healing, and the human experience.