Patients Are People

Spring 2025
By Katharine Shilcutt

Junior Hamza Saeed always planned to become a physician. It’s why he came to Rice and majored in bioengineering. Growing up in nearby Sugar Land, Texas, Saeed 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 several courses taught by former postdoc and course instructor Travis Alexander. But it was one course in particular — Medical Horror in Film and Literature — that prompted him to pursue a minor in medical humanities.

“It was interesting because typically you don’t see those two words [medical and horror] directly next to each other,” he says, adding that health professionals try to avoid characterizing the medical experience as horrifying. “Travis forced us to reckon with the films not just on a surface level, but with the questions those films brought up that didn’t have answers, like ‘What constitutes death?’” Saeed says.
 

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.

Last summer, building on these experiences, Saeed signed up for a first-of-its-kind “clinical immersion and health care inequities program,” a practicum through Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute, which 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 tracheostomies, pediatric hemodynamic monitoring and peritoneal dialysis as they worked to identify 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 says. “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 summer rounds with physicians, Saeed learned more about the very human side of medicine — for example, interviewing parents of patients in the ICU about the challenges they faced along their child’s health care journey.

“At the end of the day, the human body is not just a machine,” Saeed says. “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 — for example, 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 a non-English-predominant region?

“I’m just addicted to the idea that I could make a difference in the field of medicine — and just an M.D. or just a Ph.D. wouldn’t have that same impact,” Saeed says. “Maybe I could be the next Denton Cooley.”