New Health Humanities Major Now Offered At Penn State's Abington Campus

ABINGTON, PA — There are now a total of 24 undergraduate degrees that Penn State students can obtain exclusively at the Abington campus in suburban Philadelphia after the university announced the addition of the new health humanities major.

Penn State Abington, located in eastern Montgomery County, says that students who choose to obtain a degree in the new health humanities program will learn to "think critically about the complex social and cultural issues that define how we understand health and medicine and prepare for careers in a broad variety of fields."

"It will help students develop an understanding of the influence of cultural, social, political, and economic contexts on health, healthcare, and medicine," the school stated in a news release.

The school says that students majoring in health humanities — they can choose coursework toward either a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science — will be afforded the opportunity for experiential learning, internships, and to develop creative solutions to healthcare issues affecting both individuals and communities.

The school highlighted the story of Priya Mathiy, a rising sophomore, who choose to major in health humanities because it comports with her ultimate career aspiration as an obstetrician and gynecologist.

"In my career, I'll be dealing with people and really sensitive topics and emotions," Mathiy said in a statement. "Health humanities will support me in that aspect of my work and complement my degree in biology."

According to Penn State Abington, researchers have determined that medical students who have undergraduate degrees in the humanities perform just as well as those who enter the medical profession with science backgrounds, but that they actually tend to have more empathy and better communication skills, and a more patient-centered outlook, than those with science-only coursework.

Other Pennsylvania schools have also decided to the health humanities degree program to their respective curricula in recent time.

Last October, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh announced the addition of a health humanities program at its campus.

"We really want to change the health professions," Andreea Ritivoi, head of Carnegie Mellon's English Department, said in a previous statement. "We want them to be far more impactful globally and far more equitable. In many ways, what's available scientifically and what makes its way into society and how we live our lives is not aligned. There is a desperate need for more physicians, pharmacists and public health officials who can help to create more equitable access to quality care."

Jason D'Antonio, director of the Carnegie Mellon Health Professions Program, previously stated that the idea behind the health humanities major was to "bring the humanities, ethics, philosophy, history, as well as statistics and applied psychology to the science majors who are pre-health and help them round out their understanding of what it means to be a clinician, beyond the natural sciences."

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, health humanities programs for undergraduate students have risen exponentially in popularity over the past two decades.