Study Abroad
"The love of anything is the fruit of our knowledge of it, and grows as our knowledge deepens."
Leonardo DaVinci
Dr. Wasser’s global classroom constituted an interdisciplinary approach to physiology, the history of medicine, and the marriage of art and science. He used teaching and performance to create opportunities for growing one’s understanding of unfamiliar cultural, historical and psychological aspects of being human and for understanding the science related to the way our bodies work.
From January to July each year, Dr. Wasser served as the program leader for two faculty-led study abroad programs in Europe based in Germany, and exploring France and Austria. These programs focus on physiology and the history of medicine and provide future doctors, veterinarians, bioengineers, and biomedical researchers with a foundation in the medical humanities.
Video by Annabel Lee and Nick Ertola • Song: Cloud Chamber by Pictures of the Floating World • Licensed to YouTube by amuse (on behalf of Pictures of the Floating World), and 1 Music Rights Societies
Medical History Through Performance
Dr. Wasser emphasizes the similarities amongst art, humanities and science, asserting that all are fundamental human creations with which we have engaged since the development of society and culture. The questions asked by artists and scientists bear more similarities than one might expect. Correspondingly, an artist’s pursuit to answer questions posed in the studio is not unlike the pursuit of a scientist to seek answers in the laboratory. Dr. Wasser is a performance educator who engages students using a combination of his training as a biomedical scientist with his background in performance. Performance functions in Dr. Wasser’s pedagogy in the form of performance art techniques, voice, facial expression, corporeal body, costume and storytelling.
A thread of internationalization can be found in Dr. Wasser’s teachings, which emphasize the importance of the world-wide community that is the family of man. In teaching scientific and historical concepts, Dr. Wasser encourages students to identify the responsibility of humankind as Earth’s currently dominant species to preserve and defend one another and the rest of the biosphere. Not only an historian of medicine, Dr. Wasser is also an historian of human cultures. Every course, webinar or guided tour presented by Dr. Wasser emphasizes the importance of having an historical worldview, which allows learners to truly understand the world of the present and the potential of the future.