Medicine and the Humanities: Radical Pedagogy in Clinical Medicine and Community Responders

Seth Holmes
Medical Anthropology and Public Health
UC Berkeley

Nick Nelson
Neurology
UC San Francisco

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Anthropology
UC Berkeley

The RAD MED Working Group was an inclusive UC Berkeley-UCSF collective of medical anthropologists and graduate students, Public Health faculty and students, undergraduate students from across the social and biological sciences, pre-med and bio-engineering students, UCSF medical students and UCSF and Stanford medical residents with community physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, community health workers; patient advocates and patient-survivors; health policy scholars; physicians and nurses; university administrators; and hospital chaplains and clergy. The collective was founded by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Sam Dubal as “Envisioning Radical Experiments in Clinical Medicine and Social Science,” later known as the “The Rad Med.” The collective explored radical pedagogies in medicine and social science in regular meetings, hosted a regular speaker series, and continued to develop the Curriculum in Structural Competency, presented to doctors and other medical workers during a series of workshops over the year.