Sophomores and freshmen can now apply to minor in the medical humanities, a new interdisciplinary minor announced this year aimed at studying the intersection of medicine and health studies with the humanities.

The minor draws on classes from departments and programs including art history, classics, history, languages and literature, music, philosophy and women, gender, and sexuality studies (WGSS).

Two rounds of applications will be held each year—one in each semester—with the fall semester application period targeted towards sophomores, and the spring targeted towards freshmen due to declaring restrictions, co-founder and professor of Italian, history and WGSS Rebecca Messbarger said.

The three-year long process of creating the minor began after both faculty and students expressed interest in pursuing the field of study.

Co-founder and associate professor of history Corinna Treitel said that she found students in her Health and Disease in World History class who had taken few, if any, humanities classes before, and took the class because they saw “health” and “disease” in its title.

“They come in for the topic, and they found out that they really love history. They love being able to put the humanities piece together with the science piece,” Treitel said. “I would have a train of students through my office saying so what can I take after this, I really like being able to hold this conversation. There was nothing there.”

Similarly, an interest in a more formal medical humanities track piqued the interest of faculty members.

“There is a core of faculty, professors primarily on this campus, but also on the medical school campus who regularly found themselves at the same talks, working in collaboration, gathering together in a brown bag on the history of science and medicine and so this has been around for a long time,” Messbarger said.

Messbarger and Treitel decided to pursue forming a minor in order to give students a place to continue these conversations and studies. They both stressed that, while the minor is not only aimed at pre-health students, it was important for a school with a large number of pre-health students to have this sort of outlet.

“We want everyone who is interested in this subject matter to apply,” Messbarger said. “The reality is that more than 50 percent of our undergraduate student body comes here—at least—with the intention of pre-health and we want those hardworking, ambitious students to come into our humanities classrooms and be transformed by them. Both in terms of how they see the relevance of humanities to a future in healthcare, [but] also just the beauty and relevance of the humanities to everything.”

She added that there may also be a disinclination for students to move towards the humanities due to the pressure to satisfy requirements and hopes the minor will steer them towards more humanities studies.

Treitel and Messbarger studied others schools with more established, as well as recently created, medical humanities programs like Vanderbilt in creating the WU model. The two then met individually with each of the departments on the Danforth Campus in order to hear ideas and concerns from different faculty members.

Messbarger said she thought this sort of approach aided in the establishment of the program at this point in time.

She added that they took considerations from different faculty members in redirecting the makeup of the program and took steps to reassure humanist colleagues that the program would be focused on the humanities.

“This was not going to be a case of the humanities being in service to science,” Messbarger said. “I think that was a big fear that this is just another way where the humanities is subordinate to the sciences. We were saying, no, this is actually to privilege the humanities and revitalize the humanities and bring really hard working students from across the curriculum into our humanities classrooms.”

She also attributed support and openness from the administration as one of the reasons for the programs creation, specifically Provost Holden Thorp, Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Barbara Schaal and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences Jennifer Smith.

For now, the program will be capped at around 20 students per grade, and students will have to fill out an application in order to be considered for the minor. The application includes a transcript, letter of recommendation and a question section. Afterwards, students will be interviewed in December. Messbarger said the number of students who will get interviews will depend on the number of applications submitted.

From studying how medical humanities programs have developed at different universities, Messbarger and Treitel observed that many of these programs grew extremely rapidly. In presenting this data to the Curriculum Committee, the committee decided to place the cap on enrollment.

“We brought in one of the people who was a found member of Vanderbilt’s…and she was saying that within a year they had 200 students, and we can’t do that,” Messbarger said. “So, the Curriculum Committee was very conservative about how many people to let in, but I think it was wise. I think it was wise for them to say go slowly, make sure the infrastructure is there, that classes are taught regularly, because otherwise you’re going to have more students than you can satisfy.”

After two years, they plan to reevaluate and determine whether to increase that number.

For now, the two have no plans of turning the minor into a major, and Messbarger said any development in this direction would have to be organic. Additionally, they want to see how the minor evolves in its first couple of years, but will be keeping an eye on how other schools that have started similar programs, like St. Louis University and Boston College, are progressing.

Still, both are excited about the prospects of the major and are encouraged by the increasing support and interest from different faculty members and students.

“I’m really passionately dedicated to creating opportunities for conversations between the sciences and the humanities, and I think that medical humanities is one of the really good places for that to happen,” Treitel said.