Collaboration Across the Disciplines: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy

The two articles in this section of Literature and Medicine were written by members of an experiment in interdisciplinary pedagogy that gave advanaced Ph.D. students in English an opportunity to collaborate with faculty at Vanderbilt Medical School. The articles are not only excellent contributions to scholarship in their own right but also examples of an exciting new model for interdisciplinary training in the field of literature and medicine. Faculty in medical schools have little practical incentive to collaborate with literary scholars. The study of novels or poems might be a valuable supplement to the education of medical students, but it is hard to see how it can contribute to the funded research of medical faculty. By contrast, investigations of the ethical, social, or cultural implications of medical research from a policy perspective often enhance a research proposal and are sometimes required as a condition of granting agencies. The policy sphere is a relatively new development in our society; it dates back to the mid-1960s, when the first Institutional Review Boards were mandated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and it has grown over the past four decades to affect every aspect of scientific and medical research. 1 No study involving human subjects can go forward today without prior review of its social and ethical implications. Numerous investigators across the university collaborate with medical school faculty to examine how language, values, myth, and emotion affect the practice of medicine. To weigh cultural factors, sociologists assess survey data; anthropologists conduct focus groups; legal scholars interpret court cases; communications scholars study the image of science in journalism, advertising, television, and the web; religious scholars reflect on the impact of faith communities