After I found out that one of my courses no longer fulfilled the requirements for my secondary (Global Health & Health Policy), I had to find a substitute quickly. That class ended up being EAS170: Medicine and the Self in China and in the West.
This class wasn’t part of my original plan, but from the first few weeks, it became clear that it would shape how I think about health, the body, and the values I should have as a physician.
EAS170 (East Asian Studies 170: Medicine and the Body in East Asia and in Europe) how different medical traditions understand health, illness, and the body. Rather than focusing solely on biological mechanisms, the course emphasized experience–how people feel and interpret their own bodies within cultural and historical contexts. This approach was very different from many of the previous science courses I’ve taken, like LS1B (Life Sciences 1B) or Chem 17 & 27 (Principles of Organic Chemistry & Organic Chemistry of Life), where clear answers often take center stage.
As someone interested in medicine, this shift felt especially important. The course pushed me to think beyond diagnoses and treatments, and instead consider the values that should guide medical practice. It made me reflect more deeply on the importance of truly listening to patients’ experiences, rather than assuming that one framework alone can fully capture what someone is feeling or going through.
In class, we often discussed and looked back on the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant. In the story, each man touches a different part of the elephant and comes away with a completely different understanding of what an elephant is. They discuss and argue their findings, not able to come to a consensus. None of them are entirely wrong, but none of them are entirely correct either. We returned to this throughout the semester as a way to think about medicine: not as a single and complete truth, but as a collection of perspectives shaped by where we stand and what we are trained to notice.
Looking back on this semester, I’m grateful that a practical decision led me to a class that challenged my assumptions and expanded my perspective. EAS170 showed me that understanding the body and the self often requires holding multiple viewpoints at once, and being open to what we might not yet fully see.
