Amsterdam, Netherlands

History: Medical and Health Humanities

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: humanities
Time study: 1 year
University website: vu.nl/en
Health
Health is the ability of a biological system to acquire, convert, allocate, distribute, and utilize energy with maximum efficiency. The World Health Organization (WHO) defined human health in a broader sense in its 1948 constitution as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." This definition has been subject to controversy, in particular as lacking operational value, the ambiguity in developing cohesive health strategies and because of the problem created by use of the word "complete", which makes it practically impossible to achieve. Other definitions have been proposed, among which a recent definition that correlates health and personal satisfaction.
Health Humanities
Health humanities refers to the application of the creative or fine arts (including visual arts, music, performing arts) and humanities disciplines (including literary studies, languages, law, history, philosophy, religion, etc.) to discourse about, express, and/or promote dimensions of human health and well being. This applied capacity of the humanities is not itself a novel idea; however, the construct of the health humanities has only recently begun to emerge over the first decade of the 21st Century. Historically, the roots informing the health humanities can be traced back to, and can now be considered to include, such multidisciplinary areas as the medical humanities and the expressive therapies/creative arts therapies.
History
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.
Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the time. Today, the humanities are more frequently contrasted with natural, and sometimes social, sciences as well as professional training.
Health
With your talents and industry, with science, and that stedfast honesty which eternally pursues right, regardless of consequences, you may promise yourself every thing—but health, without which there is no happiness. An attention to health then should take place of every other object. The time necessary to secure this by active exercises, should be devoted to it in preference to every other pursuit.
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (July 6, 1787); in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1955), vol. 11, p. 558.
History
What really happens is that the author discards the human persona but replaces it by an ‘objective’ one; the authorial subject is as evident as ever, but it has become an objective subject … At the level of discourse objectivity, or the absence of any clues to the narrator, turns out to be particular form of fiction, where the historian tries to give the impression that the referent is speaking for itself.
Roland Barthes, ‘Le discours de l’histoire’ trans. as ‘Historical Discourse’ in M. Lane (ed.) Structuralism: A reader, London, Jonathan Cape, 1970, pp. 149–154.
History
The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. III (1776), Vol. 1, Ch. 3 "Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire, in the Age of the Antonines"
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