MIT Global Health and Medical Humanities Initiative (GHMHI)

The MIT Global Health and Medical Humanities Initiative (GHMHI) provides scholars the training to analyze critically the determinants of health and roles of medicine in society from historical and cross-cultural perspectives. The new Initiative wants to look at illness and disease from multiple perspectives, not only as a matter of individual physiology. This means also thinking through the political, economic, social, and cultural determinants of health.

In addition to supporting the preparation of pre-health students at MIT, the establishment of GHMHI offers a vision of several pathways to the study of “health” that MIT could offer as an Institute-wide endeavor, one that aids in fulfilling our mission to, “advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century.” Through research, courses, seminar series, and interdisciplinary fora, GHMHI provides training and mentorship in qualitative research methods to support directed research in global health, cross-cultural psychiatry, gender and health, bioethics, and human rights and health.

GHMHI is presently working to develop new qualitative research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, both within the Greater Boston area and overseas; the team recently traveled to Uganda to explore one such possibility.