Abstract
The advent of integration as a feature of contemporary medical curricula can be seen as an advantage for the medical humanities in that it provides a clear implementation strategy for the inclusion of medical humanities content and/or perspectives, while also making its relevance to medical education more apparent. This paper discusses an example of integration of humanities content into a graduate medical course, raises questions about the desirability of an exclusively integrated approach, and argues for the value of retaining a discrete and coherent disciplinary presence for the medical humanities in medical curricula.
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Notes
According to these authors, approximately 30 % of published articles on the subject over the past 10 or so years could be classified as ‘pleading the case’ for the inclusion of the Medical Humanities in the undergraduate medical course.
It should be pointed out that in staff-student meetings, the opposite view was also occasionally expressed by a minority, usually older, graduate entry students.
Interestingly, while the medical humanities is commonly criticised for the lack of unequivocal evidence regarding its effectiveness, a similar lack of evidence could be levelled at the increase in curricular time given to science content in the medical curriculum over many years. The link between more science and better medical practice seems to be taken as self-evident and only very occasionally questioned (cf Berguer 2004). In other words, curriculum decisions, whether about science or humanities content, would appear to be very often based on policy rather than pedagogical evidence.
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Chiavaroli, N., Ellwood, C. The Medical Humanities and the Perils of Curricular Integration. J Med Humanit 33, 245–254 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9183-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-012-9183-7