Medicine in crisis: a renewing call for humanities. From the editorial: 

Some humanistic disciplines, like history and philosophy, have long had a foothold in medical education through the fields of social medicine, the history of medicine and biomedical ethics. Penn State’s College of Medicine established the first humanities department within a medical school in 1967. In recent decades, the institutional growth of the medical humanities has accelerated. My informal survey of North American and British higher education turned up about 50 stand-alone centers, medical school programs and departments focused on the medical humanities — and nearly 60 undergraduate programs.

Yet even as the research centers, journals, conferences, master’s programs and other marks of academic legitimacy proliferate, my conversations with humanities scholars working in medical schools suggest that the humanities remain off the beaten track, engaging a small, self-selecting group of students. “They recognize a gap in their education, and I create a safe space to wrestle with deep questions,” said Lydia Dugdale, who teaches a philosophy seminar for medical students and directs the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics in Columbia University’s department of medicine….

Yet the time may be right for the medical humanities to gain a new hearing — even though they represent, in some ways, a return to a very old approach to understanding health. For ancient and early modern thinkers, medicine was not wholly distinct from theology or natural philosophy: an imbalance in the physical body or environment troubled the soul and vice versa. We can be grateful for scientific progress since the days when feeling sick might bring you to your local surgeon-barber for a bloodletting — while also acknowledging that earlier societies grasped something about the human condition that modern medicine has lost….

The humanities and social sciences do more than shed light on the cultural context of disease. They can also help doctors connect with patients as multidimensional beings. Skyler Kessler, a medical student at Washington University in St. Louis, has known he wanted to be an emergency room doctor since high school. As an undergraduate at the university, he minored in the medical humanities, taking courses in ethics and the history of medicine.

“I figured it would be incredibly useful in my future career as a physician,” he told me. “I knew a large portion of medicine would involve listening to patients’ stories, and that’s a skill you have to develop, to be able to listen and hear, and better communicate. I knew I would gain that skill by writing papers, making arguments and engaging in discussion. In large science courses, I wasn’t engaging in discussion.”….

For other posts on medical humanities / narrative medicine, see here.

H/t Sarah Thuesen and Rob Goldberg