The struggle over medical humanities: is their place assured in medical education? From the article:

While many respected scholars and medical educators have purported the value of humanities content in medical training, its inclusion remains unstandardized, and the undergraduate medical curriculum continues to be focused on scientific and technical content…. Edmund Pellegrino, physician and scholar of the latter twentieth century, spent much of his professional life promoting the value and importance of the humanities in medical education, seeking the best way to incorporate and teach this content in clinically relevant ways…. Regardless of his efforts and those of many others into the current century, the medical humanities remains a curricular orphan, unable to find a lasting home in medical education and training.

Arguments for the inclusion of the humanities in undergraduate medical education center around the contention that medicine and its practice is both a technical, scientific profession, as well as a humanistic, moral one…. The argument for incorporating the humanities in medical education is really two fold. First, exposure and investment in humanistic study makes doctors better clinicians. Such study helps doctors understand their patients as whole persons within the context of their lives, and trains them to think critically. Second, the humanities can be a sustaining resource for physicians to maintain their resilience and life balance….

Thus, physicians in their training must learn not only the scientific basis of disease but also the personal and human aspects of illness. It is thought that by exposing physicians to training in the humanities they can better learn to ‘see’ their patients and appreciate them as whole persons, to understand their life stories and circumstances, to hone their skills in listening and interpreting their patient’s words, and to read and think more critically. The humanities generally, but more particularly the historical disciplines, are known to provide important tools for critical thinking and inquiry, which are essential to physicians in clinical practice and research….

Edmund Pellegrino refers to medicine as “the most humane of sciences, the most empiric of arts, and the most scientific of humanities.” He asks, “Can the doctor simultaneously attend Man the molecular aggregate and Man the person; Man the unit of a complex society and Man the ineffable?”…. The medical humanities remains the curricular orphan. Can it find a home in medical education? Can it answer medicine’s cry for health and renewal?

For other posts on medical humanities, see here

h/t Philippa Göranson (@Bokofil)