A place for humanities in medical education

Abstract

The amply credentialled contributors to Creative Arts in Humane Medicine - physicians, medical students, allied health professionals and artists - provide some answers, but raise yet more questions: How shall we define terms like "medical humanities" and "humane medicine"? How useful is it to do a cost-benefit analy sis of the humanities in health care? Rachael Allen worked as an artistin- residence in anatomy and clinical skills labs in a UK medical school. As an artist embedded in a medical education setting, she explores the phenomenology of illness. How do we reconcile first-person experiences of illness and death with the objective reductionism of disease that is more typical of biotechnology in medicine? Allen poses the question, "How can the visual arts educate medical pedagogy?" This perspective contrasts with a common perception among medical educators of humanities' role as handmaiden, usually pleading to contribute to the serious enterprise of educating doctors.2 Some kind of evaluative methodology is as necessary as the defining of terms and the setting of objectives - but exactly what kind remains elusive. In the meantime, rather than creating a course in medical humanities, Dr. Rita Charon has advocated identifying "senior influential clinicians" as key players in the integration of the arts with the science of medicine. These clinicians are individuals "who themselves have been exposed to and altered ... by deep learning in humanities and narrative studies."4