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The Medical Humanities: Toward a Renewed Praxis

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Abstract

In this essay, I explore medical humanities practice in the United States with descriptions offered by fifteen faculty members who participated in an electronic survey. The questions posed focused on the desirability of a core humanities curriculum in medical education; on the knowledge, skills, and values that are found in such a curriculum; and on who should teach medical humanities and make curriculum decisions regarding content and placement. I conclude with a call for a renewed interdisciplinarity in the medical humanities and a move away from the territorial aspects of disciplinary knowledge and methods sometimes found in medical humanities practice.

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Notes

  1. Overview 2007 USMLE. Available at: http://www.usmle.org/General_Information/bulletin/2007/overview.html. Accessed January 3, 2008.

  2. NEH Definition of the Humanities. Available at: http://www.ors.ttu.edu/neh_definition_of_humanities.htm. Accessed January 16 2008.

  3. LR Dittrich and AL Farmakidis, eds. “The Humanities and Medicine: Reports of 41 U.S., Canadian, and International Programs.” Academic Medicine, 78 (2003).

  4. E Pellegrino, “Welcoming Remarks,” in Proceedings of the First Session, Institute on Human Values in Medicine, ed. L.L. Hunt (Philadelphia, PA: Society for Health and Human Values, 1972), pp. 3–9.

  5. KD Clouser, “Humanities and the Medical School,” in Proceedings of the First Session, Institute on Human Values in Medicine, ed. L.L. Hunt (Philadelphia, PA: Society for Health and Human Values, 1979), pp. 47–80.

  6. R McNeur, “Developing Human Values Teaching Programs,” in Human Values Teaching Programs for Health Professionals: Self-Descriptive Reports from Twenty-Nine Schools, ed. T.K. McElhinney (Philadelphia, PA: Society for Health and Human Values, 1977), pp. 1–7.

  7. L Kopelman, “Bioethics as a Second-Order Discipline: Who is not a Bioethicist?” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31(2006):601–628.

  8. S Squier. “Beyond Nescience: The Intersectional Insights of Health Humanities.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50 (2007):334–347.

  9. R Charon, “Narrative Medicine: Attention, Representation, Affiliation.” Narrative 13 (2005):261–70.

  10. E Pellegrino, “Reflections, Refractions, and Prospectives,” in Proceedings of the First Session, Institute on Human Values in Medicine, ed. L.L. Hunt (Philadelphia, PA: Society for Health and Human Values, 1972), pp. 100–115.

  11. J Coulehan, C Belling, P Williams, SV McCrary, and M Vetrano. “Human Contexts: Medicine in Society at Stony Brook University School of Medicine.” Academic Medicine 78 (2003):987–992.

  12. AH Jones and R Carson, “Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.” Academic Medicine 78 (2003):1006–1009.

  13. K Montgomery, T Chambers, and DR Reifler, “Humanities education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.” Academic Medicine 78 (2003):958–962.

  14. C Belling, “Toward a Harder Humanities in Medicine.” Atrium 3 (Fall 2006):1–5.

  15. JP Bishop, “Rejecting Medical Humanism: Medical Humanities and the Metaphysics of Medicine,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008):15–25.

  16. LR Lattuca. Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Among College and University Faculty. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), p. 2.

  17. T Becher and TR Browler. Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines. (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001).

  18. Lattuca, p. 3.

  19. Ibid., pp. 3–4

  20. Ibid., p. 82

  21. Ibid., p. 247.

  22. Ibid., p. 248

  23. J Derrida. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. PA Brault and MB Nass. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 41.

  24. Becher and Trowler, p. 47.

  25. M Greene, Teacher as Stranger. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973), p. 269.

  26. HM Evans and RJ Macnaughton, “A core curriculum for the medical humanities?” Medical Humanities 32 (2006):65–66.

References

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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  • NEH Definition of the Humanities, http://www.ors.ttu.edu/neh_definition_of_humanities.htm.

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  1. Northeastern Ohio Universities, College of Medicine, Rootstown, OH, USA

    Delese Wear

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  1. Delese Wear
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Correspondence to Delese Wear.

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Wear, D. The Medical Humanities: Toward a Renewed Praxis. J Med Humanit 30, 209–220 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-009-9091-7

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