Narrative Ethics: Literary Texts and Moral Issues in Medicine
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this eight-session seminar built for medical students across all four years, pairing short fiction and poetry with clinical ethics. Readings draw from Woolf, Chekhov, Carver, Kafka, Hurston, Marquez, and Tolstoy, chosen to put context, contingency, and circumstance at the center of moral reasoning rather than abstract principle. Each session opens with philosophic and literary framing from the instructor, then moves into discussion of how a given story or poem illuminates a clinical dilemma. Students keep a reading journal tracking how illness, the physician's moral role, emotion, culture, faith, and social circumstance bear on patient care. The course includes a full syllabus and session-by-session reading list as course materials, free to access through MIT OpenCourseWare with no certificate offered. It suits anyone wanting a literature-based approach to medical ethics rather than a standard bioethics lecture course.