Rice University School of Humanities
Medical Humanities Program
Houston, USA
Bachelor's degree
DURATION
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
APPLICATION DEADLINE
EARLIEST START DATE
Sep 2026
STUDY FORMAT
Key Summary
About: The Medical Humanities Programme at Rice explores social, cultural, ethical, and historical dimensions of health and illness. You’ll study how religion shapes illness beliefs, how communities view death and end‑of‑life choices, and how histories of race and harm produce health disparities. The programme examines social media, artificial intelligence, and big data’s impact on physician‑patient communication, care settings, and the human role in medicine via interdisciplinary humanities like bioethics and cultural history.
Career Outcomes: Graduates can pursue roles in health policy, bioethics, public health, patient advocacy, research, and digital health. Employers include hospitals, NGOs, research institutes, tech firms, and universities.
Welcome to the Medical Humanities Program
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.
