BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT

Hamza Saeed always planned to become a physician. It’s why he came to Rice and majored in bio- engineering. Saeed already knew being at Rice meant being next door to the world’s largest medical center. What he didn’t know was that Rice’s medical humanities courses would change his entire perspective on practicing medicine.

For Saeed, this paradigm shift began with a course called Health Horror/Body Horror.

“Typically you don’t see those two words directly next to each other,” Saeed said.

Saeed was hooked, and he began enrolling in all the medical humanities classes he could.

This also led Saeed to sign up for a first-of-its-kind practicum last summer: the clinical immersion and health care inequities program created by Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute that offered students observation rounds with physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital and the Texas Heart Institute.

During the eight-week course, Saeed and his student cohort examined issues around pediatric hemodynamic monitoring as they identified unmet needs that exacerbate disparities in patient outcomes.

“It let me see behind the veil in a way that just isn’t possible with a textbook,” Saeed said. “There’s nothing like an attending showing you how a child’s Berlin heart pump works by letting you hold one in the palm of your hand.”

Through his summer rounds with physicians, Saeed was also confronted with the very human side of medicine.

“At the end of the day, the human body is not just a machine,” Saeed said. “That’s something that sometimes gets missed in the traditional curriculum because we keep trying to reduce medicine down to something that it’s not. Patients are people, with thoughts, emotions, feelings.”

The problems encountered over the summer practicum were adapted into senior capstone projects for other bioengineering majors. Saeed helped create reference materials for those students as they learned about cardiac ablation and bias, asking whether or not a device used to treat atrial fibrillation in patients is designed with inclusivity in mind. How could it fail, for instance, when used in lower resource institutions in an area where English is not the first language?

“I’m just addicted to the idea that I could make a difference in the field of medicine — and just an M.D. wouldn’t have that same impact,” said Saeed of the ways humanities-oriented thinking has transformed his approach to health care. “Maybe I could be the next Denton Cooley.”