UNT Anthropology

Minor in Medical Anthropology

Program Description

The Medical Anthropology Minor Program at UNT will provide non-Anthropology major students with broad training covering the breadth of the field. The objective of the program is to train future medical anthropologists, physicians, nurses, PA’s, and other health professionals to recognize and understand the complex relationships that exist between social, cultural, psychological, biological, economic, and environmental determinants and health, and to analyze and evaluate how contemporary health services are organized and delivered. Students minoring in medical anthropology will be introduced to the literature and methods of medical anthropology, and topics such as the social history of sickness and medicine, medical ethics, complementary and alternative therapies, and the medical humanities.

We anticipate that such a minor will enable students to become competitive, humanistic applicants to programs that continue their graduate education, such as medical school, nursing school, physician assistant programs, occupational therapy, clinical psychology, or graduate programs in anthropology, sociology, international and public health, community development, and more. Within the Medical Anthropology Minor Program, some flexibility is built in to allow students to choose from a diversity of advanced support courses in Sociology, Applied Gerontology, Psychology, Biology, and Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Program Curriculum

Foundation Courses (3 credit hours)
Choose 1 of these courses:

ANTH 1010 Introduction to Anthropology
ANTH 1100 World Cultures
ANTH 2300 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Core Courses (3 credit hours)
Choose 1 of these courses:

ANTH 4801 Bio-cultural Perspectives on Health
ANTH 4200 Health, Healing, and Society: an Introduction to Medical Anthropology
ANTH 4220 Anthropology in Public Health

Advanced Electives (12 credit hours)
The student may choose 4 from among the following courses to fulfill this requirement. Other courses from the Undergraduate catalog may be substituted with the permission of the Medical Anthropology Minor Advisor:

ANTH 3331-001 Forensic Anthropology
ANTH 4801-001 Human Evolution
ANTH 4801-002 Biocultural Perspectives on Health*
ANTH 4801-003 Human Adaptation & Ecology
ANTH 4210-001 Culture and Human Sexuality
ANTH 4701-005 Holistic Health and Alternative Healing Systems
ANTH 4200-001 Health, Healing, and Society: an Introduction to Medical Anthropology*
ANTH 4701-006 Ethnicity, Poverty, and Health: Cultural Issues of Health and Disease
ANTH 4220-001 Anthropology in Public Health*
ANTH 4900 Special Problems (to focus on medical issues)

*Provided class has not been used to satisfy core course requirement (see above)

Sociology