The humanities and healing: how arts and literature foster empathy and engagement in medical practitioners. From the article:

Medical students benefit from appreciating and participating in the arts and humanities during their course. Not only do those who engage in pursuits such as music, theater, and visual art have characteristics associated with being better doctors, on average, but they are less vulnerable to exhaustion. In the context of other research showing more than half of doctors describe themselves as having suffered burnout while experiencing the highest suicide rate of any profession, the findings have big implications for medical studies, and probably other sciences as well….

Students with more exposure to the humanities appeared in better shape to become doctors on many measures. Most significantly, humanities exposure was associated with greater openness to new ideas, better capacity to read both students’ own and others’ emotions, as well as lower emotional exhaustion. Since so much of the arts is about providing insight into those around us, or ourselves, the connection is unsurprising. It’s less obvious why the same students were less likely to be physically exhausted and (visual art aside) had better spatial skills, but these correlations were also significant.

Decades ago C.P. Snow bemoaned the increasing tendency for people trained in either the science or the arts to know little about the other, as the old idea of the “Renaissance man (or woman)” has been replaced with increasing specialization. “The fields of art and medicine have been diverging for the last 100 years,” [Dr. Salvatore] Mangione said in a statement.

The humanities may make for better scientists, but it takes scientific methods to prove it.

An additional article on this subject is here.

For other articles on medicine and the humanities, see here.

h/t Robert Townsend (@rbthisted)