English study and medical training: what the literature tells us. Why English majors succeed in medical school.

There’s a decent chance your doctor didn’t study biology, chemistry, or any other science when they first got to college. A surprising number of students in medical schools actually have backgrounds in a surprising field: English….

People who major in English and other fields in the humanities also appear to enroll in medical schools at greater rates than other majors. According to the most recent data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, 46% of humanities majors who applied to US med schools ended up enrolling, compared to just 38% of biological science majors and 44% of physical science majors.

Humanities majors also boasted the highest MCAT scores of all applicants, [career site] Zippia found. (It is worth noting that just over 1,900 humanities majors applied to med schools last school year, compared to more than 28,000 biological science majors.)….

“English is all about studying how to communicate,” said [James] Pierce, who decided he wanted to pursue medicine three years into his undergraduate studies at the University of California-Davis. “Doctors tell people what they need to know and need to express it in a way that everyone can understand.”

“A lot of doctors get stuck saying too much jargon, and I think on the other side a lot of doctors maybe say too little and don’t address people’s concerns, because they dismiss the details of what they’re trying to describe as too complicated. I hope that having an English background will help me balance those two.”

h/t Phi Beta Kappa