Students in the medical humanities program at Rice study the social, cultural, ethical, and historical dimensions of how doctors, patients, and communities understand the lived experience of health and disease.

At Rice, our researchers and students examine how religion shapes people's understanding of illness, how people think about death and how they think about what kinds of care they would want at the end of their lives. We explore aspects of history and race, and how the legacy of harm to underrepresented groups results in continued health disparities today. We look at the ways that social media, technologies like artificial intelligence, and big data analytics are changing how physicians and patients relate to and communicate with one another. We look at how this influences not just physician-patient communication, but also how people think about where health care happens, what it looks like, and the role that human beings play in it.