As JHU’s largest undergraduate humanities major, MSH provides students with interdisciplinary, critical perspectives on science and medicine. This uniquely positions students to pursue careers in the health professions as they foreground issues of importance to society more broadly. The major is also ideal for students who plan to pursue graduate work in a range of humanities, social science, or professional disciplines.
Through interdisciplinary coursework, independent research, and community-engaged inquiry, MSH offers students opportunities to apply diverse disciplinary competencies to question, analyze, and propose creative solutions to challenges in the fields of science and technology studies and the medical humanities.
Our teaching and our faculty and student research center on these themes:
- Health and Society
- Science and Democracy
- AI, Technology, and Politics
- Environment and Planetary Health Humanities
We ask our students to sit with the discomfort that raising tough questions demands. Our goal is to equip our students with the capacity to challenge the status quo, ask deeper questions, and have the confidence to take them on with insight, humility, confidence, and integrity.
MSH majors gain awareness of theory, interpretation, and methods in specific humanistic topics related to science and medicine, rooted in humanistic disciplines. They gain exposure to multicultural perspectives through MSH coursework and through intermediate mastery of a language beyond English. MSH also requires students to acquire knowledge and experience in the natural sciences in order to add an applied dimension to their studies.
Students develop research, writing, communication, and groupwork skills as tools for meaningful social and political engagement through global and humanistic perspectives attuned to equity, justice, sustainability, and mutual care.
MSH prepares students to be better physicians, healthcare workers, researchers, consultants, scholars, civil servants, activists, and artists by equipping them with transdisciplinary tools and perspectives to understand science, technology, and medicine as central forces of our contemporary world.