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Arts and Sciences Inquiry Course:
The Curing Society

This course was taken by senior (third year) students in the Arts and Sciences Programme. This is an interdisciplinary programme that has a limited enrollment and attracts highly motivated students. The Inquiry courses in this programme provided a forum for exploration of complex issues of public concern.

In framing this course which ran from 1989-1995, I sought to provide these highly motivated students to explore issues related to health and illness. Students were told that in simplistic terms, issues of health and illness involved the dynamic interactions between providers and recipients of health care in institutional settings developed by individual societies in response to specific needs. The specific content of the course varied from year to year based on student interests. An initial session was devoted to developing a list of issues that the class considered crucial to understanding health care. Using that list as a starting point, I wrote problems to explore diverse issues. Thus the particular problems were tailored to student needs. In that sense several of the problems used may appear "dated". Nevertheless the core issues remained reasonably consistent over the 6 year period. These included amongst others: