Professor of English, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar
Dr. Alan S. Weber, PhD, has taught the Medical Humanities–including the history, philosophy and sociology of medicine and Islamic Medical Ethics–through writing intensive courses at Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar for the past twelve years. He is the author of a widely used textbook on the history of science and medicine, 19th Century Science (2000). He has directed a number of narrative medicine and medical humanities projects in Qatar at the national and institutional level including a booklet of patient education cancer survivor stories for the Qatar Cancer Society, a QNRF-funded research project on Literature and Medicine, five volumes of medical student essay writing, and the first cross-disciplinary Art-Medicine undergraduate course in the Arabian Gulf (with Stephen Scott, M.D.). He lectures internationally on the medical humanities and he was the Keynote Speaker in 2016 on “The Use of Star Trek in Medical Ethics Teaching” at the University of Malta Medical School’s Conference on the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek. He has been incorporating graphic novels into his teaching for the past three years and conducted an interventional educational trial on the use of graphic novels in medical ethics and medical humanities teaching in 2015. He has organized and Co-Directed three ACCME-accredited workshops on the medical humanities at WCM-Q, including “Learning about Patients outside the Clinic: Using Stories for Improved Healthcare Outcomes,” “Lives in Medicine: Perspectives from the Humanities”, and “The Visual Arts and Patient Care.