medical humanities essay topics

Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities

Keith Wailoo , a Fellow of the American Academy since 2021, is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (2021), Pain: A Political History (2015), and How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (2011).

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Keith Wailoo; Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities. Daedalus 2022; 151 (3): 194–205. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01938

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This essay describes the origins, growth, and transformation of the medical humanities over the past six decades, drawing on the insights of ethicists, physicians, historians, patients, activists, writers, and literature scholars who participated in building the field. The essay traces how the original idea of “humanizing physicians” evolved and how crises from death and dying, to AIDS and COVID-19, expanded humanistic inquiry into health, illness, and the human condition. It examines how a wide array of scholars, professional organizations, disciplinary approaches, academic units, and intellectual agendas came to define the vibrant field. This remarkable growth offers a counterpoint to narratives of decline in the humanities. It is a story of growing relevance shaped by tragedy, of innovative programs in medical schools and on undergraduate campuses, and vital new configurations of ethics, literature, the arts, and history that breathed new life into the study of health and medicine.

Writing in 1982, philosopher Stephen Toulmin observed that the study of ethics (which traditionally meant formal, theoretical moral philosophy) had been reenergized and transformed by its engagement with medicine. In “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics,” Toulmin explained that the ethical dilemmas of recent medicine-from death and dying, to contraception, and abortion-had catalyzed a resurgence in the once-moribund field of philosophical inquiry. Two years later, physician Eric Cassell painted a broader portrait of how problems of disease and health had nurtured humanities fields beyond bioethics. Celebrating “the place of humanities in medicine,” he wrote that “the enormously increasing power of medicine to change individual lives … and to profoundly influence social policy had all provided rich fare for philosophical, historical, and literary examination, interpretation, and analysis.” 1

In an era when health care had become powerful but also ethically challenged, new trends in the humanistic analysis and critique of medicine flourished. For many scholars drawn to the field, medicine and the humanities were entangled in a perverse love-hate relationship in which literature, history, and philosophy promised to soften medicine's rough edges and revise its “present romance with technology.” 2 In a sense, the medical humanities sought to be a counterpoint to technological hubris; it sought also to encourage physicians to have a deeper personal understanding of the impact of new technologies, new powers, and new health care dilemmas on people's lives. In the writings of Toulmin and Cassell, the medical humanities and ethics harbored a redemptive, utilitarian idea: that broad learning could nurture the soul of the doctor at a time when medicine, enraptured by science, was losing touch with the patient.

This essay draws on the insights of the ethicists, physicians, historians, patients, activists, artists, writers, literature scholars, and others who participated in the building of the medical humanities over the past six decades. The process began as an effort to “humanize medicine,” but the agenda grew and transformed remarkably over the years. The story they tell unfolds in three stages: the period from the early 1960s to the 1980s, in which developments centered in medical schools; the years of professional expansion in the 1980s and 1990s when new journals, associations, and teaching initiatives took shape; and the particularly stunning growth of medical humanities in undergraduate colleges in the 2000s, in programs taking varied institutional forms. In what follows, I allow those who participated in this transformation to describe the diversification of work done under the heading of “medical humanities.” This essay also traces how the original ideal of humanizing physicians evolved, while other goals such as exploring the human condition became more salient and as recurring crises in medicine and society catalyzed the fragmentation of the field.

The criticism articulated by Cassell and Toulmin-that medicine, in turning to science, was losing touch with patients-had been evident since the late 1950s. Increasing medical specialization was said to push doctors toward a study of disease mechanisms, and away from an understanding of illness. There was also, for example, the problem of unethical human experimentation in the post-World War ii era: the revelation that leading researchers conducted experiments such as testing drugs on vulnerable patients without their consent. Such excesses spanned from the testing of polio vaccines on children in mental institutions in the 1950s to the revelation in the 1970s about the decades-long Tuskegee syphilis study, in which Black men with the disease were observed rather than treated over four decades. The disclosures suggested a need for new regulations of professional conduct. But they also suggested a need for deeper introspection about virtue and the duties of caregiving.

As Cassell explained in the early 1980s, the events of the previous two decades had catalyzed medical humanities: for “while medical science can abstract itself and deal solely with body parts, doctors who take care of patients do not have that luxury-they must work with people … [and are faced with] the fears, desires, concerns, expectations, hopes, fantasies, and meaning that patients bring.” In this telling, the scientific guidance of physicians would always be morally impoverished without a fuller understanding of illness, suffering, and health, realities “better taught by literature and the other humanities.” 3

Both Toulmin and Cassell dated the birth of this humanistic critique to the early 1960s, when social movements and professional criticism produced curricular change. Over the decade, increasing numbers of women and students from minority backgrounds entered medical schools. The pressure for medical humanities programs was “initiated primarily by students,” explained Cassell. Rejecting the narrowness and perceived irrelevance of scientific medical training, they “were no longer content to be taught what their faculties believe important. It was essential to the students that their classes be ‘relevant’ to the problems of poverty, racial bias, and political ‘oppression.’“ 4

With health and health care in flux, the turmoil of the era made medical humanities necessary for addressing concerns of the moment. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and their social integration provoked new questions about the meaning of illness, stigma, and the role of psychiatry in society: was it the case, as critics charged, that institutionalization was merely a scientized form of social control? 5 New legislation expanded health insurance to the elderly. But why then did the American Medical Association fight so feverishly against passage of Medicare, failing to stop it? Was this an example of the profession's commitment to economic interest and not, as they claimed, the well-being of patients? And when medical science failed in its quest to preserve life, what was the role of the physician in death and dying? 6 The subtitle of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying captured the era's conceptual inversions, and its shift to more patient-centered understandings: “What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families.” Worries over the failures of “the biomedical model” ranged widely, gaining even greater force in early 1970s amid burgeoning political, legal, social, and moral debates over reproductive rights, abortion, and homosexuality. Trust in medical expertise was ebbing as core institutions were buffeted by social pressures. In the early 1970s, for example, the American Psychiatric Association gathered to debate removing “homosexuality” from its standard nomenclature of mental illnesses. Little wonder that medical ethics and humanistic understandings of patients, disease, health, and society expanded in significance in this tumultuous era.

The intense demands of the era made medical practice no longer “a field for academic, theoretical, even mandarin investigation alone…. It had to be debated in practical, concrete, even political terms,” explained Toulmin. 7 From the standpoint of the 1980s, Toulmin and Cassell saw medical humanities as a response to the “demand for intelligent discussion of the ethical problems of medical practice and research.” 8 By the early 1980s, the majority of medical schools had developed programs in the medical humanities, incorporating (in one way or another) the study of literature, history, and ethics into the training of physicians to be at least conversant with the issues swirling about the profession. Some schools had developed full-fledged departments. 9 But what neither the philosopher Toulmin nor the physician Cassell could see from the early 1980s was just how rich, diverse, and varied the field would become in the following decades.

As Toulmin and Cassell were penning their thoughts in the early 1980s, medical humanities were also taking shape in undergraduate curricula. Between 1980 and 2000, the critical humanistic analysis of medicine and health produced new scholarship in every field: in the arts, the social sciences, and in literature, history, and philosophy. New crossdisciplinary departments were devoted to the social relations of medicine and science. One such program, the one in which I earned a PhD, had been created in 1962 as the “History and Philosophy of Science,” and then changed its name to “History and Sociology of Science” in 1970. The varied names suggest the multiplicity of lenses being brought to bear on the undergraduate and graduate study of science, health, and their implications for society.

In the 1980s, medical humanities shifted focus notably toward the patient's experience and the human condition. aids , cancer, and other health struggles provided tragic catalysts for new works in literature, art, and history. The global aids pandemic, for example, raised a host of new questions not only about viral origins and epidemiology, but also about condoms, sex practices, religious tolerance, gay identity, and changing sexual politics, topics demanding integrated thinking about the human condition across the sciences, public health, social sciences, and humanities.

Where might one seek insight into this new health crisis? Was it perhaps Larry Kramer's 1985 autobiographical play, The Normal Heart , about enduring the early years of aids prejudice, indifference, struggle, and fear in New York City? Or perhaps the reflections of physician Abraham Verghese in My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS ? 10 Reviewing Verghese's book in Literature and Medicine , Joseph Cady explained that aids literature had become vast and had been produced mostly by people vulnerable to the disease. Verghese's contribution was different, telling his story as a foreign medical graduate in small town Tennessee chronicling the social trauma: the “hiv -positive heterosexual woman … infected by her bisexual husband, hemophiliacs with aids … and people with transfusion aids (Will and Bess Johnson, who posed an extra level of challenge as well-to-do, ‘pillar of the community,’ fundamentalist Christians who insist on keeping their infection secret).” 11 The nation's aids experience made clear that to fully understand the unfolding health tragedy demanded creative storytelling, narrative insight, introspection, and deep sensitivity to the complexity of the human condition. Kramer and Verghese were only two among many medical humanities ideals.

In medical education, new texts were pushing the field forward; new lines of inquiry and pedagogy were opening. When I taught in the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1990s (in the department of social medicine), humanizing the physician remained the central driving conceit. The redemptive ideal generated a new textbook in 1997, the Social Medicine Reader , a collection of fiction, essays, poetry, case studies, medical reports, and personal narratives by patients and doctors compiled for teaching. The Reader aimed to “contribute to an understanding of how medicine and medical practice is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces.” Elsewhere, physician Rita Charon and literary scholar/ethicist Martha Montello were also compiling essays for an edited collection for a new enterprise labeled “narrative medicine.” As they observed, storytelling underpinned all thoughtful caregiving: “How the patient tells of illness, how the doctor or ethicist represents it in words, who listens as the intern presents at rounds, what the audience is being moved to feel or think-all these narrative dimensions of health care are of profound and defining importance in ethics and patient care.” 12 Such developments transformed medical education in the 1990s. “By 2004,” wrote medical historian Emily Abel and sociologist Saskia Subramanian, “88 of the 125 medical schools surveyed by the American Association of Medical Colleges offered classes in the human dimensions of care, including treating patients as whole people, respecting their cultural values, and responding empathetically to their pain and suffering.” However, these courses were only “a tiny fraction of medical-school curricula.” 13

Driven by such initiatives, the 1980s and 1990s would be an era of acquisitions, new ventures, and mergers in the medical humanities: new journals established, professional associations combined, and novel academic collaborations explored. In 1980, for example, the Journal of Medical Humanities was founded, followed two years later by Literature and Medicine . In 1998, three organizations - each representing different facets of the emerging field-merged to produce the American Society of Bioethics and the Humanities ( asbh ). The oldest of the three, dating to 1969, was the Society for Health and Human Values ( shhv ). The Society for Bioethics Consultation had been founded in the mid-1980s, while the American Association for Bioethics had been established only four years before, in 1994. As the asbh 's founding president, bioethicist Loretta Kopelman, reflected, the term “humanities” was a reassuring rubric particularly for the non-ethicists, a group that encompasses a vast array of disciplines and specialties:

shhv had members from many fields including health professionals, law, religious studies, literature, pastoral care, social science, history, visual arts and student groups. Some worried that this diversity of approaches would not be valued in the same way in a new organization. For many of those fearing such marginalization, “humanities” came to stand for inclusiveness and “bioethics” for the sort of rigor in addressing problems such as are found in publications in philosophy, law, social science or academic medicine. The title “American Society of Bioethics and Humanities” reflected that we wanted all groups to thrive in asbh . 14

Many of these new ventures proved to be durable, creating the institutional supports, professional associations, journals, texts, and teaching practices necessary to sustain the field. Others, such as the Society for the Arts in Healthcare founded in 1991, were short-lived and difficult to sustain.

By 2000, divergences in the medical humanities agenda appeared, inevitably so. In medical schools, the humanities presence remained small and there would be unavoidable tensions as humanists worked within the overwhelming science-based curriculum. Reflecting on the challenge of balancing history, theory, and practice in medical education, bioethicist Thomas McElhinney observed that

the changes in medicine caused by scientific discovery and technological developments, on the one hand, and social and political transformations, on the other, increasingly highlighted the impossibility of a complete medical education structured only on theory and practice (i.e., basic science and clinical training). 15

Faced with the demands of science and clinical education, students’ responses to the little humanities they encountered varied, said McElhinney: “the humanities will be a distraction to some but an oasis in an otherwise arid environment for others.” 16 The serious and profound need for humanistic insight remained obvious even if curriculum space was limited. By contrast, however, undergraduate college education in the 2000s provided fertile soil for program building and expansive institutional development.

Since 2000, “health humanities” in undergraduate education has expanded as a vibrant complement to the “medical humanities” in medical schools, a development that moved the field significantly beyond its narrow ideals of humanizing physicians. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of undergraduate baccalaureate programs in the health humanities jumped from eight to over forty, followed by another stunning increase in the next decade. By 2021, the number of such programs had reached 119, an eightfold increase since 2000 as one recent survey by humanities and bioethics scholars Erin Gentry Lamb, Sarah Berry, and Therese Jones observed. At the same time that a crisis in the humanities brewed, the once niche field was flourishing. As Lamb, Berry, and Jones noted, “at a time when Liberal Arts education, and humanities programs in particular, are under fire in many public quarters,” health humanities programs were serving a growing, keenly interested population of students (many of whom hoped to enter health care careers).

The utilitarian impulse to produce better caregivers persisted, but the locus of humanistic health education was shifting to undergraduate curricula. And in this context, the critical sensibilities of the medical humanities sharpened. Colleges across the nation discovered that these years were “an ideal time for students to develop skills valuable … to providing humanistic health care across a wide range of health care fields.” Reaching younger students prior to entering health careers cultivated “habits of mind that prepare students for critical and creative thinking, identification of internal biases, and ethical reasoning in decision-making processes - all of which are critical skills for participating in the complex system of U.S. healthcare.” 17 The model gained traction, drawing together students from across disciplines and a range of health-oriented humanities scholars in new teaching and research initiatives.

Commenting on the diverse expansion of such programs in 2009, historian Edward Ayers observed that “we need to understand the many contexts in which the humanities live. They live in departments and disciplines, of course; but they also live in new places, in new forms, and in new combinations.” 18 Medical humanities was one such novel combination. Drawing on cultural studies, women's studies, disability studies, and other burgeoning fields, programs of medical humanities defined a “rapidly growing field, celebrating the ability of the humanities, as one program put it, to provide ‘insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, our responsibility to each other.’“ 19 Medical humanities became, for many commenters like Ayers, a leading example of the thriving humanities, a vibrant counterpoint to widespread narratives of decline.

That same year in an astute editorial in Medical Humanities , physician Audrey Shafer acknowledged the diverse field was showing new academic fracture lines. Not only did institutional and pedagogical goals differ, but gaps had opened between medical humanists who worked directly with patients or in health care settings and those who worked in other educational contexts. Collaborations suffered because “for instance, a performing arts department will have different theoretical underpinnings, methodologies, scholarly activities and products from a philosophy department.” 20 Medical humanities was an intellectual hodge-podge, in Shafer's view, suffering from an identity crisis. Yet despite tensions among scholars with different qualifications, degrees, and agendas, the enterprise remained vibrant with new “demarcations, dilemmas, and delights.” For Shafer, the struggle to hold the field together was itself productive, for “when medical humanities ceases to struggle with what it encompasses … then it will cease to be medical humanities.” 21

Many program builders in undergraduate settings did not share Shafer's worry about the field's “identity and boundary bumping,” however. “Health humanities” and “medical humanities” proved to be popular, versatile, and decidedly flexible rubrics for program building in undergraduate contexts. Programs emerged under a growing array of headings: “History, Health, and Humanities,” “Health and Society,” and “Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.” 22 If some embraced narrative ethics and centered the study of literature while others foregrounded history or ethics, this diversity reflected the robust range of what medical humanities had become. The goal remained broad, cross-disciplinary education about the human condition, and deep introspection connecting scholars across fields who were drawn together in teaching and researching the challenges of health and healing.

The agenda of medical humanities had built over time, with no single discipline claiming exclusive ownership over the enterprise. Assessing the field, literature scholar Sari Altschuler pointed forward in the conclusion to her 2018 book, The Medical Imagination . In her view, the humanities agenda in medical schools had made modest gains, confining itself to a limited agenda by “mostly aiming at improving physician empathy rather than at shaping and expanding medicine's ways of knowing.” 23 Meanwhile, programs run by humanists in undergraduate settings remained too heavily focused on the utilitarian task of preparing aspiring health care workers. Both approaches sought “to bring a sense of the human back to medicine that risked being too governed by dispassionate science, routinized procedure, and market logic.” 24 These foundational functions of the humanities in medicine (its redemptive capacity for humanizing caregivers and seeing the humanity of patients) had not changed. If anything, they had expanded remarkably in reach and scope, finding new audiences, and developing in new venues.

With this expansion, scholars in a field that had begun modestly (in hopes of humanizing physicians and exploring the human condition) now confidently asserted that the very habits of analysis in humanistic inquiry exemplified, in themselves, important “ways of knowing” about health. To Altschuler, “the number and breadth of medical and health humanities programs offer a terrific opportunity” to move beyond empathy building in medicine, and to embrace a bolder vision: “the recognition that humanists have an important and distinct set of tools for knowing the world, as do health professionals.” 25 Building on the energetic developments of the past decades, she called on humanists to engage with medical science from a new standpoint-to find common ground with medical educators by embracing the language of “competencies”: practical skill development as the bedrock of medical training. By now, these skills could be clearly articulated as “humanistic competencies-which include narrative, attention, observation, historical perspective, ethics, judgement, performance, and creativity.” 26 The list offered a lovely shorthand for the approaches, methods, and practices encompassed within the health humanities. These competencies also highlighted the fraught challenge ahead; the building of medical humanities would involve ceaseless struggle over boundaries and demarcations, even as its core commitment remained restoring humanistic understanding to the vast biomedical and health enterprise.

In the end, the remarkable growth of the health humanities over the past six decades is a story of tragic relevance, driven by the awareness not that medicine had “saved the life of ethics” as Toulmin had noted, but rather by recognition that new configurations of ethics, literature, the arts, and history were vital for breathing life into medicine.

As the medical humanities have widened their reach, one theme has persisted from the early years: professional and human crisis has spawned the search for meaning and introspection about life, illness, recovery, human suffering, the care of the body and spirit, and death. Medicine's social dilemmas, its professional controversies, human health crises, social tensions over topics from aids to abortion and genetics, as well as the profession's very identity and its claim to authority have catalyzed and fed a growing demand for answers about meaning. The recurring crisis has generated a style of humanistic insight that has flourished not only within traditional disciplines but also in the interstices.

The flourishing of medical humanities is a story of shifting energies: the emergence of new lines of inquiry, new institutional homes, and novel journals and professional associations. As the field has grown, its questions about illness, disease, and the pursuit of health have become more prominent across the academy and beyond its boundaries. The work has adapted to new trends in health movements, disability studies and activism, and questions of race and gender in relation to health. Even as new programs have developed, the work of health humanities has become ever more salient in the disciplines of history, literature, the arts, and in philosophy and ethics.

This expanding humanist venture-spanning from undergraduate and graduate teaching and research to broad public engagements-refutes the narrative of a “humanities in decline.” Redemption and humanization of the practitioner remain goals, as does the deep appreciation of suffering, recovery, and the illness experience. But the past decades have seen a wider critique: an insistence that the tools of the medical humanities are not merely restorative gap-fillers for what is lacking in scientific and technological insight, but that their discernment about the self and identity, suffering and illness are the primary lenses for understanding essential features of human experience, health, and society. The medical humanities provide, then, the means by which we understand the complex problem of how humans respond to illness, and how humans assess the role of science and medicine in the enterprise of healing.

In the same way that the human tragedy of aids confirmed the relevance of medical humanities in the 1980s and 1990s, today's global coronavirus pandemic (and its underlying issues of disparate suffering, loss, blame, conflicted belief, social inequality, misinformation, and varied cultural responses) catalyzes yet another wave of interest in health humanities. And few of covid 's challenging questions revolve around doctoring or patients alone; in covid , the health and well-being of a contentious and fractured public raised vexing questions well suited for medical humanists.

As we weather recurring waves of covid , it has become commonplace for media to turn to medical humanities scholars for insight and guidance. What could literature or history teach us about the social responses to the current pandemic? asked National Public Radio. Could the history of past pandemics provide insight into the current crisis, or serve as guides for the building of effective social responses and healthier, more equitable societies? To answer such questions, public media has sought answers from scholars like French professor Alice Kaplan, who was busily writing a new introduction to Camus's The Plague . In early 2020 during the first wave of covid , sales of the book skyrocketed in Europe. “People are saying in the French press, what do you absolutely need to read in this time? You need to read The Plague,” Kaplan explained. “Almost as though this novel were a vaccine-not just a novel that can help us think about what we are experiencing, but something that can help heal us.” 27

The medical humanities began in crises and critiques of medicine, and crisis continued to make the health humanities vital, timely, and necessary. To be sure, the utilitarian ideals remained focused on creating well-rounded medical practitioners. But the field now encompasses a grander and more widely institutionalized, and still richly debated, promise of healing and restoration through literature, the arts, history, and ethics. 28 So while it is true that medicine “saved the life of ethics,” it is also the case that over these decades, the medical humanities has breathed new life into the humanities while also offering society a kind of healing that medicine itself cannot provide. This remarkable growth offers a counterpoint to narratives of decline in the humanities. It is a story of growing relevance shaped by tragedy, of innovative programs in medical schools and on undergraduate campuses, and vital new configurations of ethics, literature, the arts, and history that have profoundly rejuvenated the study of health and medicine.

Daniel Callahan, Arthur Caplan, and Bruce Jennings, “Preface” to Eric Cassell, The Place of the Humanities in Medicine (Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Hastings Center, 1984), 5.

Cassell, The Place of the Humanities in Medicine , 6.

Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper Collins, 1961).

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families (New York: Scribner, 1969).

Stephen Toulmin, “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 25 (4) (1982): 749.

Cassell listed the four as Pennsylvania State, Wright State, Southern Illinois, and University of Nebraska. Cassell, The Place of the Humanities in Medicine , 12.

Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart: A Play (New York: Plume, 1985); and Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (New York: Vintage, 1994).

Joseph Cady, “My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (review),” Literature and Medicine 15 (2) (1996): 278–282.

Rita Charon and Martha Montello, “Memory and Anticipation: The Practice of Narrative Ethics,” in Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics , ed. Rita Charon and Martha Montello (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Emily K. Abel and Saskia K. Subramanian, After the Cure: The Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 141.

Loretta M. Kopelman, “1997: The Birth of ASBH in Pictures and Commentaries,” American Society of Bioethics and Humanities, https://asbh.org/uploads/FINAL_1997-The_Birth_of_ASBH.pdf .

Thomas K. McElhinney, “Reflections on the Humanities and Medical Education: Balancing History, Theory, and Practice,” in The Health Care Professional as Friend and Healer: Building on the Work of Edmund Pellgrino , ed. David C. Thomasma and Judith Lee Kissell (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2000), 271.

Ibid., 289.

Erin Gentry Lamb, Sarah Berry, and Therese Jones, “Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States and Canada” (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 2021), 5, https://case.edu/medicine/bioethics/education/health-humanities .

Edward L. Ayers, “Where the Humanities Live,” Dædalus 138 (1) (Winter 2009): 24–34.

Audrey Shafer, “Medical Humanities: Demarcations, Dilemmas, and Delights,” Medical Humanities 35 (1) (2009): 3–4.

Lamb et al., “Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States and Canada,” 10–12.

Sari Altschuler, “Humanistic Inquiry in Medicine, Then and Now,” in The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 198.

Ibid., 198.

Ibid., 199.

Ibid., 200.

Melissa Block, “‘A Matter of Common Decency’: What Literature Can Teach Us about Epidemics,” National Public Radio, April 1, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/04/01/822579660/a-matter-of-common-decency-what-literature-can-teach-us-about-epidemics ; and Audie Cornish, “How Do Pandemics Change Societies? A Historian Weighs In,” National Public Radio, March 11, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/03/11/976166829/how-do-pandemics-change-societies-a-historian-weighs-in .

E. D. Pellegrino, “Medical Humanism: The Liberal Arts and the Humanities,” Review of Allied Health Education 4 (1981): 1–15; and E. D. Pellegrino, “The Humanities in Medical Education: Entering the Post-Evangelical Era,” Theoretical Medicine 5 (1984): 253–266.

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The Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities foundation area enables medical students to study a chosen area in depth as a complement to the breadth of knowledge and skills gained by general medical education. Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities is an opportunity for interested students to reflect on, analyze, and contribute to the meaning of medicine by focusing on one (or more!) of the diverse fields that contribute to bioethics and/or the arts and humanities as related to medicine. Resources and events related to medical humanities can be found by exploring the Medicine and the Muse Program . Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities students will be able to examine the ethical and humanistic dimensions of research and practice, and focus on issues that they will confront whether at the laboratory bench or at the bedside. We define "Biomedical Ethics" as broadly encompassing the examination of the ethics of all biomedical research, medicine, and health care. We envision the "Humanities" to include the traditional humanities fields of literature, philosophy, history, religion, and the arts (visual, theatre, media), as well as humanities-oriented social sciences (including anthropology and sociology). Here are examples of topics within Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities: the impact of medical and technologic advances (such as genomics, stem cell research, etc); neuroethics; history of medicine; issues of health care access and public health policy; doctor-patient relationship and communication; end-of-life issues; medicine and the media; medicine and society; literature and medicine; medical anthropology; empathy and the experience of illness; the arts and medicine. There are many more. Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities is a richly interdisciplinary concentration. For example, a student who wishes to do a film on choices in the neonatal intensive care unit would study filmmaking and editing, communication, family interactions, neonatology, issues of limited resources, ethics of medical advances, informed consent issues, etc. Due to the medical school's ideal location on the same campus as the University, medical students in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities benefit from multiple opportunities for interdisciplinary work across the campus.

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30+ Medical Argumentative Essay Topics for College Students

by Antony W

June 9, 2024

Medical argumentative essay topics give you some brilliant ideas that you can explore and defend depending on the research you’ve conducted.

As with any argumentative essay topic , a medical related essay also requires you to take a stance and use objective, verifiable, and reasonable evidence to defend your position.

However, the kinds of topics many students pick to explore in the medical field are often quite too common.

Think of type II diabetes, cardiovascular illness, breast cancer, and cirrhosis. These are topics you don’t want to cover for the simple reason that they are too common.

In this post, we give you a list of 30+ medical argumentative essay topics that aren’t too obvious.

These topic ideas should enable you to add a new spin to your work, so that you can write a medical essay that focuses on an issue that will capture the attention of your audience (reader) almost instantly.

30+ Medical Argumentative Essay Topics

Below is a list of 30+ essay topics that you may find interesting for your medical argumentative essay assignment :

Controversial Medical Argumentative Essay Topics

The cost of healthcare in the United States of America is not justifiable
Do homeless people deserve free healthcare simply because they don’t have money to pay medical bills?
Unconventional medication should not be part of a state’s healthcare system
There’s a strong link between poor health and poverty
People should not turn to homeopathy because it isn’t more effective compared to seeking medical advice
People with no health insurance cover deserve to get equal treatment at medical healthcare facilities
Should the government take action against unexpected errors in medical settings?
Doctors should not have the right to endorse medical products until verified for safety and effectiveness
Healthcare institutions should provide opt-out and opt-in donor system
There’s no true justification for the rising cost of healthcare in the United States of America

In theory, areas such as genetic engineering, diagnostics, and medical research can be interesting to explore within the medical field.

However, the assignment requires hours of intensive research, proper structuring, writing, and editing.

If you don’t have the time for all that, you can get argumentative assignment help from one of our team of writers.

Health Practices Argumentative Essay Topics

The marijuana drug should be made legal worldwide
TV shows on diet and weight loss don’t motivate people to improve their body image and self-esteem
Is the state responsible for teaching people how to lead a healthy lifestyle?
Communication authorities should impose an indefinite ban on TV shows that promote cosmetic surgery
TV commercials that promote fast foods and alcohol should not be banned.
It’s a waste of time to impose state regulation on fast food chains and alcohol sales as it undermines people’s freewill to food choices.
Should we allow and encourage teenagers to use birth control pills?
The state should not encourage the use of products manufactured at the cost of another person’s well-being.
Exercise alone can’t improve your health
Doctors should not ask for medical consent if they know they can save a patient from a particular illness

Medical Laws and Policies Argumentative Essay Topics

Should the government declare euthanasia illegal?
Doctors should not insist on providing medical treatment to minors if their parents are against such treatments.
The vaccination of children against illnesses should be voluntary
An organ transplantation committee should not consider an individual’s accomplishment to determine if they can receive an organ
Patients should decide if they would like to use surrogate pregnancy for health reasons or on demand
Is doctor-patient confidentially necessary anymore?
There’s no concrete evidence that living a sedentary and lavish lifestyle is the number one cause of weight gain
Should we support the legalization of abortion ?
Should patients with mental health conditions receive treatment in or outside of their community?
People should not accept organ transplantation because of leading an unhealthy life

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Argumentative Essay Topics on Medical Research

Genetic engineering is humanly unethical and morally wrong and should therefore not be allowed
Are there effective means to mitigate threats posed by medical research?
There is no reasonable evidence that the Covid-19 global pandemic originated from a lab I Wuhan, China
Medics should not use animals to test the effective of drugs on humans
Computers used in medical research and diagnostic cannot replace doctors no matter how sophisticated they become.
Should human beings be subject to mandatory medical testing without their consent?
Should the federal government and health organizations, such as the UN and CDC, finance practical medical research?
Do we need to have limits when subjecting human beings to absolutely necessary medical tests?
The Corona virus is a biochemical weapon built in the lab to wipe out the human race
There’s no sufficient evidence to prove that pills that delay aging can make the human race immortal

Medical Argumentative Essay Topics on Healthcare Management

Is healthcare management doing enough to maintain the right standards in healthcare facilities?
Are privately owned hospitals managed better than public hospitals?
Registered nurses should not assume the role of a physician even in the event of a serious medical emergency
Human Resource Management (HR) isn’t doing enough to improve and protect the quality of healthcare
Do surgeons play an important role outside their medical capacities?
Are healthcare institutions responsible for the protection of the environment?
The relationship between and among medical staff can affect the quality of patients of different illnesses.
There’s no relationship between a patient’s medical results and a hospital’s revenue.
It’s easy to improve the relationship among staff members in a healthcare facility
Should medical management allow and encourage intimate relationships among the staff members?

General Medical Argumentative Essay Topics

Has the American government invested enough funds to improve healthcare service for its residents?
There should be as many male nurses as there are female nurses
Are data management systems in hospitals accurate and safe against breach?
Do prisoners have the right to access quality healthcare?
Electronic health record systems have more limitations than benefits.

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Antony W is a professional writer and coach at Help for Assessment. He spends countless hours every day researching and writing great content filled with expert advice on how to write engaging essays, research papers, and assignments.

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Medical Humanities StoryLab is a new initiative of Medicine and the Muse, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and the Stanford Health Library. Our goal is to help more people tell important stories related to health care, caregiving, bodies, trauma, ecology and healing.

Let us help you build vivid, compelling stories out of research, personal experience, imagination, and insights. StoryLab is open to the broader health community, including students, faculty, staff and patients, and all levels of experience. StoryLab appointments are available for coaching storycraft, podcast production, writing the personal essay, poetry and more.

Make an appointment today for a story coaching session with members of the Stanford Medicine community!

Brian Smith

Brian loves writing, reading, people, and dogs. He also enjoys running, making cut-paper art, and nature photography. During his undergraduate degree he majored in Biology and minored in English, and he is now a first-year medical student at Stanford. His writing can be found in JAMA Oncology, The Intima, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Unlost, and elsewhere.

Favorite Topics: -Narrative Medicine -Creative nonfiction -Flash Fiction -Poetry

Cynthia Nguyen

Cynthia is a cross-cultural psychiatrist in private practice, adjunct clinical associate professor at Stanford medical school, and advisor to undergrads in Human Biology. She has taken care of refugees/immigrants since the fall of Saigon in 1975, long before she ever thought of becoming a doctor. Now, she sees people with intergenerational/secondary trauma and is interested in post-traumatic growth and resilience. Cynthia completed 9 years of a PhD program in languages and civilizations at Harvard before switching to medical school at Stanford. She is very interested in the trauma story and narrative arc of patients and of those of us who work in healthcare.

Favorite Topics: -Making meaning from your narrative arc -Intergenerational issues in healthcare -Cross-cultural issues in healthcare -Trauma of working in healthcare -Post-traumatic growth and resilience in healthcare workers, patients, humans -Empathy and storytelling -Art, medicine, and healing

Christy Hartman

Christy is the program coordinator for the Medicine and the Muse program. In addition, she was a mentor and producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project, co-teaching narrative storytelling and podcast production. She holds an MA in ecopsychology and environmental humanities and studied creative nonfiction at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She has been awarded fellowships from the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Her essays have been published in Souvenir Lit Journal, About Place Journal, the Stanford Daily, and in the book, Aftermath: Explorations of Loss & Grief.

Favorite Topics: -Intimate journalism -Personal essay -Personal statements -Ecopsychology

Frish Brandt

Frish is a Letter Midwife, helping people write essential letters. Her practice began in palliative care and soon branched out to include anyone who is mortal. She is associated with Stanford Hospital, Commonweal, By the Bay Health while often inquiries come randomly from people who have heard her on the radio or read an article.

Frish is a Fellow in the Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI) which has provided her the opportunity to explore the many wonders of the MEDICINE AND THE MUSE PROGRAM.

Letter midwifery is her first calling which came second. In her other life she is the President of Fraenkel Gallery, a well-regarded gallery working primarily with photographers.

"While I thought the letters I assisted with were for the recipient, I learned quickly they are first for the letter writer. Everyone has a letter in them."

Favorite Topics: -Thank you -I love you -I'm sorry -I need to tell you something -Writing to your future self

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243 amazing humanities topics for research.

Humanities is an academic discipline that deals with studying the different aspects of culture and human society. This field has a rich historical background that distinguishes it from other empirical approaches to the natural sciences.

The different fields in humanities include archaeology, classics, philosophy, religion, linguistics, and languages. You will encounter methods such as hermeneutics and source criticism in the course of your study. It is crucial to understand that scholars in humanities significant to questions rather than answers.

What Are Humanities Topics?

These are topics that major in interpreting the known facts and look at them from a fresh perspective. Unlike sciences and other fields, there are no restrictive rules – you can create them in the form of art.

Humanities topics involve the study of human society and social relationships. Such titles are analytical and deal with the philosophical questions of what makes us human. Since they trace their origin from ancient Greece, these topics take a more historical turn.

When coming up with humanities topics, it is essential to consider the following:

They should be practical
They should impact society as a whole
Should relate the historical and current perspectives

Humanities students have the rare opportunity of understanding ancient and modern events that shape human life. You can learn all things from the romantic era’s poetry to the rise and fall of empires in the 15th century. It thus widens your understanding of the historical perspectives of almost every aspect of life.

In humanities topics, college students get strengthened in their research, writing, and critical thinking skills. But what are the best topics in humanities that you can present and score an A+?

Look at the topics below for inspiration.

Best-Rated Anthropology Humanities Paper Topics

How different aspects of the social sciences relate with humanities and human biology.
Reproducible and verifiable experiments in human anthropology
Local traditions that shape the structure and functioning of human life
Scientific methods to understand social phenomena in the society
Why do humanities use nuanced descriptions rather than general laws?
A critical look at the different branches of anthropology
Factors that inhibit the study of anthropological linguistics
Why cultural anthropology receives a cold shoulder among most undergraduate students
Describe a case study that properly illustrates sociocultural anthropology
Why is it difficult to provide a holistic account of humans and human nature?
Why do anthropologists only specialize in one sub-field?
Explain the importance of the biological, linguistic, historical, and cultural aspects of any problem.
Describe the impact of anthropology arising as a science in Western societies
Major industrial trends associated with anthropology research
Effectiveness of methodological drives in studying peoples in communities with more simple social organization
Why non-western cultures are least accepted in most countries?
The quest for holism in the study of humanities
How to use the biogenetic, archaeological, and linguistic data in humanities

Professional Topics For Humanities Classes

Factors affecting the proper record keeping of archaeological data
The role of architecture, biofacts, and Eco facts in human archaeology
Using culture history to reconstruct past lifeways in ancient culture
Explain the various changes in human societies through time.
Describe the origin of humanities in the Classical Greek
How the general education dating from the Sophists in the mid-5th century influenced humanities
The role of early Middle Ages Church Fathers in humanities
Describe the role of 15th-century Italian humanists to denote secular literary
How ancient Greek and Latin studies have helped advance research in humanities
The impact of the separation of humanities from the realm of the divine
Methods of the maturing physical sciences in the scholarly arena
Discuss the contemporary conceptions concerning the study of humanities
Conduct a complete analysis of the humanities curriculum in the U.S.A.
How to propagate a self-sufficient system of human values in the society
How to distinguish the humanities from the social sciences

High-Quality Topics For Humanities Research Papers

How different countries vary in the way of their social interactions
What is the impact of breaking down humanities into other majors?
Global political and economic issues affecting the study of humanities
Using sociology to draw a complete picture of how the world works
How to reinvent the best ideas from the past occurrences effectively
The role of critical thinking and effective communication in humanities
Which set of abilities should students have for humanities?
Discuss the factors that affect the behavior of individuals and society
Why are humanities papers on marriage among the most relevant nowadays?
Is it true that focusing on the family is vital for one’s self-development?
Discuss the notion of different societies concerning aging
Why is the world still struggling with the problem of inequality to date?
Factors affecting changes in social interactions among communities
The role of social media in shaping the perspectives of different people
Evaluate the factors affecting teenagers in the 21st century

Impressive Topics For Humanities Research Paper

Discuss the impact of various social movements in advocating for change
Why is child abuse still a pertinent issue in the 21st century?
The role of social backgrounds in contributing to conflicts at workplaces
What is the main challenge facing racial movements?
An analysis of the reaction of people towards social policies
Elaborate on the trends and impacts of irresponsible teenage behavior in the society
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of early marriages
Why should parents not restrict their children from accessing the internet?
Analyze the different class systems and their impact on associations
What is the primary cause of criminal organizations in different societies?
A case study of cliques among high school and college students
The risk of delaying early childhood education among children in the U.S.A.
Discuss the various clashes between different social classes in the world
What is the place of the marginalized in society?
Discuss the impact of the Me Too movement on the girl-child

Hot Humanities Research Topics

What are the leading causes of drinking among a majority of the population?
Discuss the various means of dealing with institutional crisis
The role of capitalism and communism in the study of humanities
What are the impacts of immigration into the U.S. from Mexico?
The role of gender in determining leadership positions in the society
Theoretical foundations of humanities in different institutions
Discuss the significant differences between sects and cults
Elaborate on the impact of the myths and misconceptions about coronavirus
The role of poverty in facilitating violence and civil unrest
Is cultural segmentation a good thing?
The effect of technology on preserving historical facts
Why social theories are essential in the field of humanities
Discuss the origin of the discrimination against African-Americans
An overview of the effects of cultural assimilation
Is it possible to eliminate healthcare disparities among the LGBT community?

Interesting Humanities Topics

Discuss the role of video games in advancing violence in societies
Why fashion is becoming a distraction for many in the society
Discuss why the topic of abortion is a live wire in most societies
A case study of mass media and fear during terrorism attacks
Discuss the social role of mass media in communities
Why has online dating distorted the necessity of marriages?
Discuss the evolution of lifestyles from the 15th century to date
The part of body images in appealing to emotions
Why are most college students victims of poor time management?
The effects of the social, cultural engagements in the development of societies
Discuss the political aspects that relate to social interactions
Why are primarily teenagers and youths defiant to their parents?
Why people from different nationalities differ from each other
Why can’t the millennial live without updates of any event?
Social issues affecting students in colleges and universities

Latest Humanities Project Ideas

Discuss the different branches of humanities concerned with creative audio-visual pursuits
Conduct an in-depth analysis of the human communication and behavior
Critically examine the role of the justice system in advancing equality
Current issues facing societies about the coronavirus prevention protocols
The part of statistical data relating to population
Explore the environmental foundations necessary for humanities
Look at the gender divide in society and how to address it
Discuss the cultural construct of the masculine and feminine identity
Explore the field of Geography and its relationship to humanities
How people interact with different physical features
What are the challenges when it comes to relations between nations?
Examine why language is essential for any society to thrive
The role of multi-cultural and regional dimensions to humanities
Why the study of beliefs, histories, values, and geographic backgrounds is necessary
A systematic review of the issues affecting rational arguments

Top-Tier Humanities Topics Ideas

Examine the role of religion and mythology in the study of humanities
Why is pop music gaining acceptance among the general population?
Investigate the relationship between society and social relationships
Explore how the politics and government of the United States has evolved over the ages
Study the implications of studying philosophy to the growth of a society
Dive into the impact of peer-reviewed humanities papers
The role of diversity in making the world a better place
The importance of intersectionality and discrimination in any society
Why differences can also advance peace and harmony
Discuss the social relations between Islam and Christians
Evaluate the process that led to the unification of Germany
How did the Vietnam War affect the relationships of different countries?
Outline the impacts of the great migration
Impact of the Women’s Suffrage movements in championing for female rights
How did the Ottoman Empire contribute to socialization?

World-Class Topics in Humanities

Discuss the conflict between religion and social order
What is the best disciplinary action for employees’ misconduct outside work
The role of sales tax on internet purchases
Why it is essential to understand the history of Europe in understanding humanities
Why are human beings anatomically similar?
The part of Greek and Latin texts and language in the study of humanities
Why are the classical-era scholars in important in humanities?
Discuss the role of humanities in institutions of higher learning
Why do humanities and liberal studies make up the bulk of specialization for college students
Give a substantive analysis of the renaissance-era humanists
The place of a balanced curriculum in fostering critical humanist skills
How humanities help students achieve analytical and problem-solving skills
Why do most universities require multiple humanities courses?
Discuss the events that led to the French revolution
The implications of William Shakespeare’s plays

Medical Humanities Research Topics

Discuss the ethical and humanistic dimensions of medicine
Analyze the impact of various medical and technological advances
The growing interest of researchers in the field of neuro-ethics
Discuss the relationship between medicine and humanities
How has the history of medicine varied with that of the humanities sector?
Critical issues of healthcare access and public health policy
What are the factors facing doctor-patient relationships?
Discuss how to deal with end-of-life issues in medicine
How does the media impact the study and progress of medicine?
Analyze the relationship between medicine and society
Who are the most significant scholars in medical anthropology?
A critical analysis of empathy and experience of illness
Choices available for doctors in the neonatal intensive care unit
How the issues of limited resources impact access to medical care
Analyze the ethics of medical advances

Good Research Topics For Humanities

Informed consent issues for the matter of terminal diseases
Why is humanities a rich interdisciplinary concentration?
The vital importance of diversity in any society
The state of empathy and sympathy during the COVID-19 pandemic
Explore the different aspects of poetry
Is it practical for anyone to work late in the night?
How modern literature writers find meaning and inspiration in the works
Ethical issues involved in the dialysis of the obese, homeless, and diabetic
Why motivational interviewing was preferred for patients with diabetes?
Discuss the effects of stigma among leaders
The role of technology in reshaping the future of social interactions
An innovative approach on the psychological aspects students
Discuss the essentials of a practical counseling session
Why do there exist disparities between the likeness of children to their parents
The effects of becoming a counseling psychologist

Unique Topics For Humanities Research Paper

Personal and professional reflections on the 9/11
How parents can handle children with disabilities
The impact of social media on the freedom of speech: A case of Facebook
The role of the international criminal court in maintains world law and order.
Analyze the economic context of a novel
Emergent property and consciousness in the study of philosophy
Discuss the effectiveness of the theories of punishment
Are we likely to experience a third and fourth wave of feminism?
What are the factors that are likely to cause philosophical anarchism?
Discuss the growth and spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America
Evaluate the impact of the Great Awakenings in the U.S. history
Conduct an overview of the Shia minorities in the Middle East
What are the social and cultural implications of the Religious Freedom Act?
Do atheists honestly believe that there is no God?
How to foster relationships among the Catholics and Evangelicals

College Humanities Essay Topics

The necessity of teaching children the gender issues
What is the origin of the discussions for and against gay marriages?
Is it correct to say that everyone is a stereotype by default?
An overview of the international marriages and globalism
The impact of spending more time on social networking sites
The role of social norms and cultures in a given society
Why do most people experience challenges shifting from one culture to another?
Discuss the relationship between a class and a student’s performance
Are unconventional families essential for the growth and development of any child?
Why do most students prefer foreign education over any other?
Discuss the concept of the right to privacy
Why do some studies need to engage in patriotism students?
The role of economic prosperity in influencing patriotism
Discuss the relationship between social media and addiction
A case study of WhatsApp as the best social media group in the U.S.A.

Topics in Digital Humanities

Discuss the various tools and methods for nineteenth-century American literature
Understanding how the media is involved in human interactions
Why digital communications technologies are the new norm
Analyze the nature and extent of the digital revolution
The history of computing in the humanities
A humanistic critique of the computational methods
Why most practitioners are opting for digital communication
The role of the computer as a continual tool of innovation
The process of using and building digital projects
Incorporating digital technologies in archiving archaeological data
Discuss the connection between traditional and digital textual scholarship
Large-scale digital literary analysis
Explore the potential of the digital academic data
The broader context of the digital humanities
How to computationally research and teach in humanities

Humanities And Arts Research Topics

Home-schooling
Literacy levels in America
The role of prayer in schools
Programming and advertising
The portrayal of women by media
Physical attention techniques
Affirmative action programs in the U.S.A.
What is the way forward on gambling?
Race relations
Learning disabilities
Family values
Intelligence tests
Distant learning
White-collar jobs
Morals and values

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Using the Gold Foundation’s medical student essays to teach humanism

This post is part of our collection of “ Gold Nuggets ” — our way of alerting the medical community to original artwork, poetry or multimedia that stimulate discussion and reflection. If you have something you think would make for good discussion by the medical community, you can submit a Gold Nugget by following these instructions .

I teach several medical humanities classes– to medical students and undergraduates– and I lecture on the use of medical humanities in teaching humanism and clinical skills. In this process I’ve used some of the winning essays from the Gold Foundation’s Annual Essay Contest as a teaching tool because I’ve found them to be so very effective.

Why use medical student writing examples to teach medical students? The answer resides partly in the power, authority, and influence of a compellingly written narrative that brings a topic to life and finds a permanent place in the reader’s memory. They show rather than tell; instead of giving an order to remember the key points, they show why a behavior is significant.

Recently, a fourth-year medical student told me that he wished medical humanities classes were required at the University of Florida (where these classes are currently electives) because the effort of reading narratives, watching movies, and listening to patient stories helped to create a permanent reminder that patients are human beings with personal stories and real lives. The development of humanism in medicine requires that these lessons be firmly imprinted, since there are so many factors in medical training and medicine that can throw people off track. Only when the message includes a compelling story that produces an emotional response does it truly become a lesson to be remembered.

The answer also resides partly in the power, authority, and influence of medical students themselves. Undergraduates tend to admire medical students for having successfully navigated the required medical school hoops, and feel that medical students can be trusted (since students may perceive that certain professors or other authority figures may not truly be on a student’s “side”). Medical students also lack the intimidating level of authority of some professors.

Thus, a written message from another medical student is a wonderful teaching tool. It works especially well when the author illustrates key points in his or her medical training and emotional development as a physician. Such a message may also reflect some of the concerns that the readers have (as there is great power in not feeling “alone”). If such a message additionally provides a valuable piece of information on how better to interact with and treat patients, it is particularly powerful.

A number of the winning essays from the Gold Foundation’s Annual Medical Student Essay Contest have proved valuable in illustrating significant points. Links to the full text of the top 3 essays of each year can be found here . Here are two examples of essays I have taught:

My Most Famous Patient by Amit V. Khera, 3rd year student at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine I use Khera’s essay primarily in a class for undergraduates who have been accepted into a 7-year undergraduate/medical school program. The course pairs the teaching of clinical skills with related humanities. Students do a Readers Theater depicting physicians who put aside their stereotypes in favor of truly seeing the patient, and then we discuss the essay. We also practice the exercise in Khera’s essay by asking each student to identify something about himself or herself that makes each of them famous. Thus, students come away with a practice that they can apply to their own patients– a reminder to ask patients about their life outside of the healthcare setting– and with substantial knowledge about how and why that practice can improve the physician-patient relationship.
An essay about the value of using art to teach observational skills by Eliza Miller, 2nd year student at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons This essay both illustrates the value of using art to enhance clinical observation skills, and comments on the ways in which art can humanize medicine. It provides a powerful reminder of the ways in which education can enhance or hinder the growth of humanism. As Eliza Miller wrote, “My reason points out that time constraints in medical training make this kind of learning far too inefficient. My heart argues that we cannot afford to ignore the lessons learned at the museum. If we neglect our creative learning process, we retreat, both from our patients and our humanity.”

Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig serves as medical historian for the Health Science Center at the University of Florida and directs medical humanities programming in the College of Medicine. She is an advisor for the UF Gold Humanism Honor Society and works on a variety of programs and projects on topics ranging from eugenics to arts in traditional African healthcare systems to the use of medicinal plants in Harry Potter.

13 medical students named 2024 gold student summer fellows.

Gold Foundation selects 7 summer projects designed to support humanistic care in underserved communities The Arnold P. Gold Foundation is delighted to announce that 13 medical students have been selected … chevron_right Read more

Announcing the winners of the 2024 Dr. Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest

The Arnold P. Gold Foundation is pleased to announce the six winning essays of the 2024 Dr. Hope Babette Tang Humanism in Healthcare Essay Contest: the top three by medical students … chevron_right Read more

Medical Students’ Project Improves Rural Health Care Access

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Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities

This essay describes the origins, growth, and transformation of the medical humanities over the past six decades, drawing on the insights of ethicists, physicians, historians, patients, activists, writers, and literature scholars who participated in building the field. The essay traces how the original idea of “humanizing physicians” evolved and how crises from death and dying, to AIDS and COVID -19, expanded humanistic inquiry into health, illness, and the human condition. It examines how a wide array of scholars, professional organizations, disciplinary approaches, academic units, and intellectual agendas came to define the vibrant field. This remarkable growth offers a counterpoint to narratives of decline in the humanities. It is a story of growing relevance shaped by tragedy, of innovative programs in medical schools and on undergraduate campuses, and vital new configurations of ethics, literature, the arts, and history that breathed new life into the study of health and medicine.

W riting in 1982, philosopher Stephen Toulmin observed that the study of ethics (which traditionally meant formal, theoretical moral philosophy) had been reenergized and transformed by its engagement with medicine. In “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics,” Toulmin explained that the ethical dilemmas of recent medicine–from death and dying, to contraception, and abortion–had catalyzed a resurgence in the once-moribund field of philosophical inquiry. Two years later, physician Eric Cassell painted a broader portrait of how problems of disease and health had nurtured humanities fields beyond bioethics. Celebrating “the place of humanities in medicine,” he wrote that “the enormously increasing power of medicine to change individual lives . . . and to profoundly influence social policy had all provided rich fare for philosophical, historical, and literary examination, interpretation, and analysis.” 1

In an era when health care had become powerful but also ethically challenged, new trends in the humanistic analysis and critique of medicine flourished. For many scholars drawn to the field, medicine and the humanities were entangled in a perverse love-hate relationship in which literature, history, and philosophy promised to soften medicine’s rough edges and revise its “present romance with technology.” 2 In a sense, the medical humanities sought to be a counterpoint to technological hubris; it sought also to encourage physicians to have a deeper personal understanding of the impact of new technologies, new powers, and new health care dilemmas on people’s lives. In the writings of Toulmin and Cassell, the medical humanities and ethics harbored a redemptive, utilitarian idea: that broad learning could nurture the soul of the doctor at a time when medicine, enraptured by science, was losing touch with the patient.

T he criticism articulated by Cassell and Toulmin–that medicine, in turning to science, was losing touch with patients–had been evident since the late 1950s. Increasing medical specialization was said to push doctors toward a study of disease mechanisms, and away from an understanding of illness. There was also, for example, the problem of unethical human experimentation in the post–World War II era: the revelation that leading researchers conducted experiments such as testing drugs on vulnerable patients without their consent. Such excesses spanned from the testing of polio vaccines on children in mental institutions in the 1950s to the revelation in the 1970s about the decades-long Tuskegee syphilis study, in which Black men with the disease were observed rather than treated over four decades. The disclosures suggested a need for new regulations of professional conduct. But they also suggested a need for deeper introspection about virtue and the duties of caregiving.

As Cassell explained in the early 1980s, the events of the previous two decades had catalyzed medical humanities: for “while medical science can abstract itself and deal solely with body parts, doctors who take care of patients do not have that luxury–they must work with people . . . [and are faced with] the fears, desires, concerns, expectations, hopes, fantasies, and meaning that patients bring.” In this telling, the scientific guidance of physicians would always be morally impoverished without a fuller understanding of illness, suffering, and health, realities “better taught by literature and the other humanities.” 3

With health and health care in flux, the turmoil of the era made medical humanities necessary for addressing concerns of the moment. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and their social integration provoked new questions about the meaning of illness, stigma, and the role of psychiatry in society: was it the case, as critics charged, that institutionalization was merely a scientized form of social control? 5 New legislation expanded health insurance to the elderly. But why then did the American Medical Association fight so feverishly against passage of Medicare, failing to stop it? Was this an example of the profession’s commitment to economic interest and not, as they claimed, the well-being of patients? And when medical science failed in its quest to preserve life, what was the role of the physician in death and dying? 6 The subtitle of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying captured the era’s conceptual inversions, and its shift to more patient-centered understandings: “What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families.” Worries over the failures of “the biomedical model” ranged widely, gaining even greater force in early 1970s amid burgeoning political, legal, social, and moral debates over reproductive rights, abortion, and homosexuality. Trust in medical expertise was ebbing as core institutions were buffeted by social pressures. In the early 1970s, for example, the American Psychiatric Association gathered to debate removing “homosexuality” from its standard nomenclature of mental illnesses. Little wonder that medical ethics and humanistic understandings of patients, disease, health, and society expanded in significance in this tumultuous era.

The intense demands of the era made medical practice no longer “a field for academic, theoretical, even mandarin investigation alone . . . . It had to be debated in practical, concrete, even political terms,” explained Toulmin. 7 From the standpoint of the 1980s, Toulmin and Cassell saw medical humanities as a response to the “demand for intelligent discussion of the ethical problems of medical practice and research.” 8 By the early 1980s, the majority of medical schools had developed programs in the medical humanities, incorporating (in one way or another) the study of literature, history, and ethics into the training of physicians to be at least conversant with the issues swirling about the profession. Some schools had developed full-fledged departments. 9 But what neither the philosopher Toulmin nor the physician Cassell could see from the early 1980s was just how rich, diverse, and varied the field would become in the following decades.

A s Toulmin and Cassell were penning their thoughts in the early 1980s, medical humanities were also taking shape in undergraduate curricula. Between 1980 and 2000, the critical humanistic analysis of medicine and health produced new scholarship in every field: in the arts, the social sciences, and in literature, history, and philosophy. New crossdisciplinary departments were devoted to the social relations of medicine and science. One such program, the one in which I earned a PhD, had been created in 1962 as the “History and Philosophy of Science,” and then changed its name to “History and Sociology of Science” in 1970. The varied names suggest the multiplicity of lenses being brought to bear on the undergraduate and graduate study of science, health, and their implications for society.

In the 1980s, medical humanities shifted focus notably toward the patient’s experience and the human condition. AIDS , cancer, and other health struggles provided tragic catalysts for new works in literature, art, and history. The global AIDS pandemic, for example, raised a host of new questions not only about viral origins and epidemiology, but also about condoms, sex practices, religious tolerance, gay identity, and changing sexual politics, topics demanding integrated thinking about the human condition across the sciences, public health, social sciences, and humanities.

Where might one seek insight into this new health crisis? Was it perhaps Larry Kramer’s 1985 autobiographical play, The Normal Heart , about enduring the early years of AIDS prejudice, indifference, struggle, and fear in New York City? Or perhaps the reflections of physician Abraham Verghese in My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS ? 10 Reviewing Verghese’s book in Literature and Medicine , Joseph Cady explained that AIDS literature had become vast and had been produced mostly by people vulnerable to the disease. Verghese’s contribution was different, telling his story as a foreign medical graduate in small town Tennessee chronicling the social trauma: the “ HIV -positive heterosexual woman . . . infected by her bisexual husband, hemophiliacs with AIDS . . . and people with transfusion AIDS (Will and Bess Johnson, who posed an extra level of challenge as well-to-do, ‘pillar of the community,’ fundamentalist Christians who insist on keeping their infection secret).” 11 The nation’s AIDS experience made clear that to fully understand the unfolding health tragedy demanded creative story-telling, narrative insight, introspection, and deep sensitivity to the complexity of the human condition. Kramer and Verghese were only two among many medical humanities ideals.

In medical education, new texts were pushing the field forward; new lines of inquiry and pedagogy were opening. When I taught in the medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1990s (in the department of social medicine), humanizing the physician remained the central driving conceit. The redemptive ideal generated a new textbook in 1997, the Social Medicine Reader , a collection of fiction, essays, poetry, case studies, medical reports, and personal narratives by patients and doctors compiled for teaching. The Reader aimed to “contribute to an understanding of how medicine and medical practice is profoundly influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic forces.” Elsewhere, physician Rita Charon and literary scholar/ethicist Martha Montello were also compiling essays for an edited collection for a new enterprise labeled “narrative medicine.” As they observed, storytelling underpinned all thoughtful caregiving: “How the patient tells of illness, how the doctor or ethicist represents it in words, who listens as the intern presents at rounds, what the audience is being moved to feel or think–all these narrative dimensions of health care are of profound and defining importance in ethics and patient care.” 12 Such developments transformed medical education in the 1990s. “By 2004,” wrote medical historian Emily Abel and sociologist Saskia Subramanian, “88 of the 125 medical schools surveyed by the American Association of Medical Colleges offered classes in the human dimensions of care, including treating patients as whole people, respecting their cultural values, and responding empathetically to their pain and suffering.” However, these courses were only “a tiny fraction of medical-school curricula.” 13

Driven by such initiatives, the 1980s and 1990s would be an era of acquisitions, new ventures, and mergers in the medical humanities: new journals established, professional associations combined, and novel academic collaborations explored. In 1980, for example, the Journal of Medical Humanities was founded, followed two years later by Literature and Medicine . In 1998, three organizations–each representing different facets of the emerging field–merged to produce the American Society of Bioethics and the Humanities ( ASBH ). The oldest of the three, dating to 1969, was the Society for Health and Human Values ( SHHV ). The Society for Bioethics Consultation had been founded in the mid-1980s, while the American Association for Bioethics had been established only four years before, in 1994. As the ASBH ’s founding president, bioethicist Loretta Kopelman, reflected, the term “humanities” was a reassuring rubric particularly for the non-ethicists, a group that encompasses a vast array of disciplines and specialties:

SHHV had members from many fields including health professionals, law, religious studies, literature, pastoral care, social science, history, visual arts and student groups. Some worried that this diversity of approaches would not be valued in the same way in a new organization. For many of those fearing such marginalization, “humanities” came to stand for inclusiveness and “bioethics” for the sort of rigor in addressing problems such as are found in publications in philosophy, law, social science or academic medicine. The title “American Society of Bioethics and Humanities” reflected that we wanted all groups to thrive in ASBH . 14

the changes in medicine caused by scientific discovery and technological developments, on the one hand, and social and political transformations, on the other, increasingly highlighted the impossibility of a complete medical education structured only on theory and practice (i.e., basic science and clinical training). 15

S ince 2000, “health humanities” in undergraduate education has expanded as a vibrant complement to the “medical humanities” in medical schools, a development that moved the field significantly beyond its narrow ideals of humanizing physicians. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of undergraduate baccalaureate programs in the health humanities jumped from eight to over forty, followed by another stunning increase in the next decade. By 2021, the number of such programs had reached 119, an eightfold increase since 2000 as one recent survey by humanities and bioethics scholars Erin Gentry Lamb, Sarah Berry, and Therese Jones observed. At the same time that a crisis in the humanities brewed, the once niche field was flourishing. As Lamb, Berry, and Jones noted, “at a time when Liberal Arts education, and humanities programs in particular, are under fire in many public quarters,” health humanities programs were serving a growing, keenly interested population of students (many of whom hoped to enter health care careers).

The utilitarian impulse to produce better caregivers persisted, but the locus of humanistic health education was shifting to undergraduate curricula. And in this context, the critical sensibilities of the medical humanities sharpened. Colleges across the nation discovered that these years were “an ideal time for students to develop skills valuable . . . to providing humanistic health care across a wide range of health care fields.” Reaching younger students prior to entering health careers cultivated “habits of mind that prepare students for critical and creative thinking, identification of internal biases, and ethical reasoning in decision-making processes–all of which are critical skills for participating in the complex system of U.S. healthcare.” 17 The model gained traction, drawing together students from across disciplines and a range of health-oriented humanities scholars in new teaching and research initiatives.

Commenting on the diverse expansion of such programs in 2009, historian Edward Ayers observed that “we need to understand the many contexts in which the humanities live. They live in departments and disciplines, of course; but they also live in new places, in new forms, and in new combinations.” 18 Medical humanities was one such novel combination. Drawing on cultural studies, women’s studies, disability studies, and other burgeoning fields, programs of medical humanities defined a “rapidly growing field, celebrating the ability of the humanities, as one program put it, to provide ‘insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, our responsibility to each other.’” 19 Medical humanities became, for many commenters like Ayers, a leading example of the thriving humanities, a vibrant counterpoint to widespread narratives of decline.

That same year in an astute editorial in Medical Humanities , physician Audrey Shafer acknowledged the diverse field was showing new academic fracture lines. Not only did institutional and pedagogical goals differ, but gaps had opened between medical humanists who worked directly with patients or in health care settings and those who worked in other educational contexts. Collaborations suffered because “for instance, a performing arts department will have different theoretical underpinnings, methodologies, scholarly activities and products from a philosophy department.” 20 Medical humanities was an intellectual hodge-podge, in Shafer’s view, suffering from an identity crisis. Yet despite tensions among scholars with different qualifications, degrees, and agendas, the enterprise remained vibrant with new “demarcations, dilemmas, and delights.” For Shafer, the struggle to hold the field together was itself productive, for “when medical humanities ceases to struggle with what it encompasses . . . then it will cease to be medical humanities.” 21

Many program builders in undergraduate settings did not share Shafer’s worry about the field’s “identity and boundary bumping,” however. “Health humanities” and “medical humanities” proved to be popular, versatile, and decidedly flexible rubrics for program building in undergraduate contexts. Programs emerged under a growing array of headings: “History, Health, and Humanities,” “Health and Society,” and “Medicine, Science, and the Humanities.” 22 If some embraced narrative ethics and centered the study of literature while others foregrounded history or ethics, this diversity reflected the robust range of what medical humanities had become. The goal remained broad, cross-disciplinary education about the human condition, and deep introspection connecting scholars across fields who were drawn together in teaching and researching the challenges of health and healing.

The agenda of medical humanities had built over time, with no single discipline claiming exclusive ownership over the enterprise. Assessing the field, literature scholar Sari Altschuler pointed forward in the conclusion to her 2018 book, The Medical Imagination . In her view, the humanities agenda in medical schools had made modest gains, confining itself to a limited agenda by “mostly aiming at improving physician empathy rather than at shaping and expanding medicine’s ways of knowing.” 23 Meanwhile, programs run by humanists in undergraduate settings remained too heavily focused on the utilitarian task of preparing aspiring health care workers. Both approaches sought “to bring a sense of the human back to medicine that risked being too governed by dispassionate science, routinized procedure, and market logic.” 24 These foundational functions of the humanities in medicine (its redemptive capacity for humanizing caregivers and seeing the humanity of patients) had not changed. If anything, they had expanded remarkably in reach and scope, finding new audiences, and developing in new venues.

With this expansion, scholars in a field that had begun modestly (in hopes of humanizing physicians and exploring the human condition ) now confidently asserted that the very habits of analysis in humanistic inquiry exemplified, in themselves, important “ways of knowing” about health. To Altschuler, “the number and breadth of medical and health humanities programs offer a terrific opportunity” to move beyond empathy building in medicine, and to embrace a bolder vision: “the recognition that humanists have an important and distinct set of tools for knowing the world, as do health professionals.” 25 Building on the energetic developments of the past decades, she called on humanists to engage with medical science from a new standpoint–to find common ground with medical educators by embracing the language of “competencies”: practical skill development as the bedrock of medical training. By now, these skills could be clearly articulated as “humanistic competencies–which include narrative, attention, observation, historical perspective, ethics, judgement, performance, and creativity.” 26 The list offered a lovely shorthand for the approaches, methods, and practices encompassed within the health humanities. These competencies also highlighted the fraught challenge ahead; the building of medical humanities would involve ceaseless struggle over boundaries and demarcations, even as its core commitment remained restoring humanistic understanding to the vast biomedical and health enterprise.

I n the end, the remarkable growth of the health humanities over the past six decades is a story of tragic relevance, driven by the awareness not that medicine had “saved the life of ethics” as Toulmin had noted, but rather by recognition that new configurations of ethics, literature, the arts, and history were vital for breathing life into medicine.

As the medical humanities have widened their reach, one theme has persisted from the early years: professional and human crisis has spawned the search for meaning and introspection about life, illness, recovery, human suffering, the care of the body and spirit, and death. Medicine’s social dilemmas, its professional controversies, human health crises, social tensions over topics from AIDS to abortion and genetics, as well as the profession’s very identity and its claim to authority have catalyzed and fed a growing demand for answers about meaning. The recurring crisis has generated a style of humanistic insight that has flourished not only within traditional disciplines but also in the interstices.

This expanding humanist venture–spanning from undergraduate and graduate teaching and research to broad public engagements–refutes the narrative of a “humanities in decline.” Redemption and humanization of the practitioner remain goals, as does the deep appreciation of suffering, recovery, and the illness experience. But the past decades have seen a wider critique: an insistence that the tools of the medical humanities are not merely restorative gap-fillers for what is lacking in scientific and technological insight, but that their discernment about the self and identity, suffering and illness are the primary lenses for understanding essential features of human experience, health, and society. The medical humanities provide, then, the means by which we understand the complex problem of how humans respond to illness, and how humans assess the role of science and medicine in the enterprise of healing.

In the same way that the human tragedy of AIDS confirmed the relevance of medical humanities in the 1980s and 1990s, today’s global coronavirus pandemic (and its underlying issues of disparate suffering, loss, blame, conflicted belief, social inequality, misinformation, and varied cultural responses) catalyzes yet another wave of interest in health humanities. And few of COVID ’s challenging questions revolve around doctoring or patients alone; in COVID , the health and well-being of a contentious and fractured public raised vexing questions well suited for medical humanists.

As we weather recurring waves of COVID , it has become commonplace for media to turn to medical humanities scholars for insight and guidance. What could literature or history teach us about the social responses to the current pandemic? asked National Public Radio. Could the history of past pandemics provide insight into the current crisis, or serve as guides for the building of effective social responses and healthier, more equitable societies? To answer such questions, public media has sought answers from scholars like French professor Alice Kaplan, who was busily writing a new introduction to Camus’s The Plague . In early 2020 during the first wave of COVID , sales of the book skyrocketed in Europe. “People are saying in the French press, what do you absolutely need to read in this time? You need to read The Plague ,” Kaplan explained. “Almost as though this novel were a vaccine–not just a novel that can help us think about what we are experiencing, but something that can help heal us.” 27

1 Daniel Callahan, Arthur Caplan, and Bruce Jennings, “Preface” to Eric Cassell, The Place of the Humanities in Medicine (Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Hastings Center, 1984), 5.
2 Cassell, The Place of the Humanities in Medicine , 6.
3 Ibid., 47.
4 Ibid., 13.
5 Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper Collins, 1961).
6 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families (New York: Scribner, 1969).
7 Stephen Toulmin, “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 25 (4) (1982): 749.
9 Cassell listed the four as Pennsylvania State, Wright State, Southern Illinois, and University of Nebraska. Cassell, The Place of the Humanities in Medicine , 12.
10 Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart: A Play (New York: Plume, 1985); and Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (New York: Vintage, 1994).
11 Joseph Cady, “ My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (review),” Literature and Medicine 15 (2) (1996): 278–282.
12 Rita Charon and Martha Montello, “Memory and Anticipation: The Practice of Narrative Ethics,” in Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics , ed. Rita Charon and Martha Montello (New York: Routledge, 2002).
13 Emily K. Abel and Saskia K. Subramanian, After the Cure: The Untold Stories of Breast Cancer Survivors (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 141.
14 Loretta M. Kopelman, “ 1997: The Birth of ASBH in Pictures and Commentaries ,” American Society of Bioethics and Humanities .
15 Thomas K. McElhinney, “Reflections on the Humanities and Medical Education: Balancing History, Theory, and Practice,” in The Health Care Professional as Friend and Healer: Building on the Work of Edmund Pellgrino , ed. David C. Thomasma and Judith Lee Kissell (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2000), 271.
16 Ibid., 289.
17 Erin Gentry Lamb, Sarah Berry, and Therese Jones, “ Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States and Canada ” (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University, 2021), 5.
18 Edward L. Ayers, “Where the Humanities Live,” Dædalus 138 (1) (Winter 2009): 24–34.
19 Ibid., 32.
20 Audrey Shafer, “Medical Humanities: Demarcations, Dilemmas, and Delights,” Medical Humanities 35 (1) (2009): 3–4.
21 Ibid., 4.
22 Lamb et al., “Health Humanities Baccalaureate Programs in the United States and Canada,” 10–12.
23 Sari Altschuler, “Humanistic Inquiry in Medicine, Then and Now,” in The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 198.
24 Ibid., 198.
25 Ibid., 199.
26 Ibid., 200.
27 Melissa Block, “‘ A Matter of Common Decency’: What Literature Can Teach Us about Epidemics ,” National Public Radio, April 1, 2020; and Audie Cornish, “ How Do Pandemics Change Societies? A Historian Weighs In ,” National Public Radio, March 11, 2021.
28 E. D. Pellegrino, “Medical Humanism: The Liberal Arts and the Humanities,” Review of Allied Health Education 4 (1981): 1–15; and E. D. Pellegrino, “The Humanities in Medical Education: Entering the Post-Evangelical Era,” Theoretical Medicine 5 (1984): 253–266.

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v.32(6); 2022 Dec

A Pilot Study to Understand the Role of Medical Humanities in Medical Education

Clark pitcher.

1 Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington, DC USA

Arya Prasad

Daniel marchalik.

2 Division of Palliative Medicine, Department of Medicine, MedStar Washington Hospital Center, Washington, DC USA

4 Department of Urology, MedStar Washington Hospital Center, Washington, DC USA

Hunter Groninger

Lakshmi krishnan.

3 MedStar Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC USA

Michael Pottash

Over the past 20 years, the number of colleges offering programs in medical humanities has increased, and through the Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University, this pilot study sought to understand students perceived benefits of a medical humanities curriculum. Based on a qualitative thematic analysis of free-response survey reflections from students enrolled in three unique medical humanities courses, six themes emerged. The themes help capture the role that a medical humanities education can play in shaping future clinicians and demonstrate that these courses not only provided a distinct teaching methodology from the scientific classroom but also appeared to deepen the students’ understanding of the humanistic aspects of medicine and its many facets.

Introduction

The medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field that approaches health and medicine through the lens of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Over the past two decades, the number of baccalaureate, graduate, and certificate programs in medical humanities has increased steadily [ 1 ] to expand analyses of healthcare and to connect future clinicians with the more humanistic side of medicine.

Whether through literature, medical ethics, film, or the arts, numerous studies have shown that students exposed to the humanities may become more empathetic and well-rounded clinicians [ 2 – 6 ]. A multi-institutional US survey conducted by Mangione et al. [ 7 ] revealed that medical student exposure to the humanities correlated with positive personal qualities that are valued in clinicians such as empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, and emotional resilience. Another study [ 8 ] found that the implementation of non-medical reading intervention for palliative care clinicians was associated with protection against burnout. These early findings suggest that the continued integration of medical humanities into pre-medical and medical education is of the utmost importance.

In the spring of 2020, interdisciplinary faculty at Georgetown College and the Georgetown University School of Medicine offered several pilot medical humanities courses to undergraduate and medical students as part of the newly established Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative. At the conclusion of these pilot courses, students were asked to provide reflections to five open-ended questions. In this short communication, we present a qualitative analysis of these student reflections to better understand the perceived benefits of our pilot medical humanities curriculum.

Materials and Methods

In the spring of 2020, undergraduate students at Georgetown College and graduate medical students at the Georgetown University School of Medicine participated in several pilot medical humanities courses including ‘Medicine and Mystery,’ ‘Medical Nonfiction,’ and ‘Living and Dying’ (Table (Table1 1 ).

Short description of courses taught during the pilot period, including number of students

Course	Students	Description
Medicine and Mystery	25 Undergraduate 2 Graduate	Medicine and mystery literature share a vocabulary of observation, fact-finding, evidence, and diagnostic reasoning. This course used historical and contemporary sources such as literary prose and poetry, sociological and philosophical texts, patient narratives, fiction written by physicians, medical case reports, TV and film clips, and podcasts to investigate how such narratives have shaped and are shaped by the social and cultural context of medicine
Medical Nonfiction	15 Undergraduate 3 Graduate	This course focused exclusively on non-fiction narratives and medical journalism in various narrative forms, such as print (long form essay, memoir), and audio-visual media in order to better understand health reporting, physician and patient experiential writing, public health and policy topics, and illuminate the many ways in which medicine interfaces with society
Living and Dying	Taught separately to 25 undergraduate and 40 graduate	This course explored the controversial and challenging questions of living and dying through examination of the medical humanities, participating in reflective discussions, and examining real-life clinical cases. Participants were asked to engage with works of literature, film, visual and performing arts that bring into relief central questions of what it means to be and to express oneself as a human being through life and at the end

Course

Students

Description

Medicine and Mystery

25 Undergraduate

2 Graduate

Medicine and mystery literature share a vocabulary of observation, fact-finding, evidence, and diagnostic reasoning. This course used historical and contemporary sources such as literary prose and poetry, sociological and philosophical texts, patient narratives, fiction written by physicians, medical case reports, TV and film clips, and podcasts to investigate how such narratives have shaped and are shaped by the social and cultural context of medicine

Medical Nonfiction

15 Undergraduate

3 Graduate

This course focused exclusively on non-fiction narratives and medical journalism in various narrative forms, such as print (long form essay, memoir), and audio-visual media in order to better understand health reporting, physician and patient experiential writing, public health and policy topics, and illuminate the many ways in which medicine interfaces with society

Living and Dying

Taught separately to 25 undergraduate and 40 graduate

This course explored the controversial and challenging questions of living and dying through examination of the medical humanities, participating in reflective discussions, and examining real-life clinical cases. Participants were asked to engage with works of literature, film, visual and performing arts that bring into relief central questions of what it means to be and to express oneself as a human being through life and at the end

The 1 credit courses (12–15 h) were taught by dual-trained physician educators/humanities and ethics scholars with guest professors from various humanities and social sciences departments. Two of the courses were a mixture of undergraduate and medical students (see Table Table1). 1 ). The teaching methods included pre-class readings, small-group discussions, and case-based learning. At the end of each course, the students were asked to provide free-response reflections to five open-ended questions through an anonymous electronic survey platform (Table (Table2). 2 ). Responding to these questions was voluntary, anonymous, and not in any way linked to student evaluations. This qualitative study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Georgetown University. All study participants provided oral informed consent.

Survey questions administered to students at the end of each course


(1) How did this course surprise you?
(2) How did this course make you reconsider prior understanding/beliefs?
(3) Was there something you wanted to discuss more, or something that you wanted to discuss that we did not cover at all?
(4) How do you think this might change your approach to medicine and health? To other fields?
(5) How would you change this course for future students (ie suggestions on readings, topics covered, discussions etc.)?

Forty-one student reflections underwent qualitative thematic analysis in several steps. Three investigators (CP, AP, and MP) independently reviewed de-identified transcripts to assign codes to the content. A preliminary codebook was developed through an iterative process that involved the investigators comparing respective codes until achieving consensus and grouping into themes using grounded theory. The three other investigators (DM, LK, and HG) reviewed the themes to resolve discrepancies and help reach common thematic determinations.

Results and Discussion

After qualitative analysis, six themes emerged from the student reflections. Themes and a sample of student quotes are shown in Table Table3. 3 . Four of the themes related to content and two to the structure of the courses.

Themes that emerged during thematic analysis of student reflections




“I think it might make me open to more collaborative approaches in health.”
“I was surprised to hear the different conceptions of death from people in different academic fields.”

“I had to rethink a lot after this class and I’m still not sure how I stand on some issues… but my world has definitely been opened about the meaning of living, aging, and suffering.”
“Listening to different perspectives and sources… I felt as if I was able to solidify my own personal beliefs about the subject matter.”

“The vulnerability and humanness of the providers we read about and learned from made me better able to put myself in the shoes of a physician.”
“Quite frankly, it sometimes terrifies me that I could be a doctor responsible for other people’s lives. I’m still getting used to imagining myself as a physician in a way that feels less like dress-up and more like commitment.”

“I made me consider things from new perspectives, especially that of a person injured or sick.”
“As a medical student, it helped me more thoroughly examine the stigma around illness”


“I think it really helped our discussions to have pre-med [students] and non-premed [students]; science and non-science majors; and undergrads and medical students. I found it very refreshing to have such a broad array of perspectives and opinions in the course.”
“I think that this was largely because I have never had an M.D. teach one of my classes or been in a course with medical students. As an undergrad, I found hearing their stories and listening to their contributions during discussions to be incredibly revealing of what lies ahead for me in medical school, residency, & beyond.”

“I was surprised at how much more reflective and conscientious I was in my day-to-day during this course and I hope to bring that level of awareness into my every day in the future.”
“On many occasions, I reconsidered and re-evaluated my prior understandings and beliefs on death and what it means to live. My concept and notion of death constantly was updating based on our readings and class meetings.”

While the content of the three courses varied slightly, the underlying themes capture the role medical humanities serves in the curriculum. Briefly, students found that a multidisciplinary teaching style provided a holistic and meaningful understanding of medicine in a non-clinical setting; vulnerable and honest conversations about difficult topics prompted self-reflection; the students considered the challenges and complexities of being a physician; and they gained insight into the patient experience.

Additionally, the overall structure of the courses was similar, and the structural themes reflect the uniqueness of the medical humanities teaching environment. The students appreciated the diversity and integration of the class participants including scholars, public intellectuals, medical students, undergraduates, and physicians all in one classroom setting — facilitating the sharing of unique perspectives and promoting an understanding of their peers. The emphasis on self-reflection allowed students to evaluate their own perspectives on features of the human condition.

Themes developed from this study help capture the role that medical humanities pedagogy can play in shaping future clinicians. These pilot courses not only provided a distinct teaching methodology from the scientific classroom but also helped facilitate a fuller understanding of medicine by approaching it from less traditional viewpoints. This new lens appeared to deepen the students’ understanding of the humanistic aspects of medicine and its many facets.

This study was limited by its reliance on a small, non-random sampling of student reflections. Students self-selected to participate in these elective courses and then again to provide reflective writing samples. However, our findings are consistent with the current understanding of the benefits of a medical humanities curriculum.

The findings described above will guide the Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University expands to include a minor degree at the undergraduate college and more classes in the medical school. We will continue to focus on classwork that emphasizes self-reflection, build on our interdisciplinary faculty teaching plan, and plan for more cross-campus collaboration that brings together undergraduates, medical students, and clinicians. We plan to continue our research by including perspectives from a larger, more diverse student cohort to elucidate the value of a medical humanities curriculum more fully.

Acknowledgements

The Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative is supported by Humanities Connections grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Fundamental Role of Arts and Humanities in Medical Education grant from the Association of American Medical Colleges and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Declarations

This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Georgetown University. All study participants provided oral informed consent.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Conversations across the medical humanities

Critical Medical Humanities: The Literary Connection

As part of our ‘medhums 101’ series, blaise sales explores how the imaginative, reflective and analytical skills of the literary field are a vital component of multidisciplinary approaches to medicine in the 21st century..

For those new to the field of medical humanities, the pairing of certain humanities approaches with medicine may seem fairly straightforward. After all, philosophy has been intertwined with medical understanding and ethical practice since BCE times; the history of medicine is self-explanatory and has its own GCSE module in the UK ; and the politics of how medicine and society interrelate is glaringly evident in the wake of COVID-19.

However, I’ve found that the role of literature can cause some head-scratches. After their initial confusion, people often try to clarify my MA subject as “the representation of medicine in works of literature?”. Well, that is a part of it. But as Angela Woods and Anne Whitehead point out in the Edinburgh Introduction to the Critical Medical Humanities , the ‘literary’ is more than just a set of texts that fit the criteria of prose, poetry and fiction; it is also a critical orientation with a distinctive methodology (Whitehead and Woods 2016). Literary analysis asks important questions about language, form, function, context, narrative – features found in all cultural systems and artefacts, not just the literary text.

The related field of ‘Literature and Science’ studies challenges the culturally enforced, hierarchical distinction between ‘useful science’ and ‘useless literature’ (Squier 1999). As George Levine puts it in a seminal essay-collection: “Literature and science, whatever else they may be, are modes of discourse, neither of which is privileged except by the conventions of the cultures in which they are embedded” (Levine 1987). So in what ways can the separate fields of literature and medicine be mutually ‘useful’ to one another? And why is the ‘critical’ approach of the current, ‘second wave’ of the medical humanities so important to thinking about how we can answer this question without reducing or conflating the specific analytical tools and knowledge that both disciplines have to offer (Bleakley 2013)? To answer these questions, let’s journey back to the early ways in which ‘literature’ and ‘medicine’ were connected in the ‘first wave’ of the Medical Humanities’ lineage .

A photo of a stethoscope on top of an open book

Narrative medicine, pathography and the ‘first wave’ of medical humanities

For Rita Charon, Professor of Clinical Medicine and author of Narrative Medicine (2006), the relationship between literature and medicine should not be considered a new phenomenon; rather, this connection is ‘enduring because it is inherent’ (Charon 2000). Charon helped to establish ‘narrative medicine’, an approach to medical education that uses the ‘literary’ method of narrative interpretation to help clinicians understand the complexities of a medical condition on an empathic level that foregrounds patient experience. In the US, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter’s Doctors’ Stories (1991) is one of the first examples of narrative medicine, while in the UK, Trisha Greenhalgh and Brian Hurwitz’s Narrative Based Medicine (1998) helped to initiate this approach. Like Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller (1995), narrative medicine’s emphasis on the patient’s subjective experience as a mode through which to make sense of illness was very influential to the concerns of first wave medical humanities: namely, the shifting of authority from a narrow biomedical purview to the patient’s lived experience. Indeed, the literary genre of ‘pathograpy’ (illness memoir) long preceded the establishment of the medical humanities, with famous examples including Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill (1925) and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980).

While Charon and Frank’s emphasis on narrative storytelling in both the clinician’s practice and the patient’s healing has played an important role in these first wave approaches, it has been criticised on two fronts. Firstly, it erroneously assumes that the ‘literary’ and ‘narrative’ are synonymous. Clark frames and contains illness as a linear journey from ‘chaos to quest’, from ‘mystery’ to ‘mastery’ (Bates and Goodman 2014). But very often, a patient’s experience of illness resists and exceeds the capacities of this sort of pre-assumed ‘metanarrative’ and requires other mediums of expression and forms of sense-making (Woods 2013). Secondly, it assumes that the ‘literary’ component is only an ‘additive’ to what medicine already does (Evans and Greaves 1999). The ‘literary perspective’ is injected into pre-established medicine, rather than changing or challenging the modes in which medicine as a discourse and a cultural institution operates in any foundational way (Whitehead 2013). This is where the ‘critical’ aspect of the second wave medical humanities enters our discussion.

The critical, the speculative, and the ‘second wave’ of medical humanities

In the manifold history of human thought, the notion of a taxonomical and bounded ‘discipline’ only emerged in the nineteenth century (Squier 1999). The critical medical humanities challenges thinking along disciplinary lines: it exposes the historicity and provisionality of the concept of a bounded ‘territory of knowledge’, and uses the ‘disruptive rebellion’ of critique to challenge some of the assumptions masked beneath the ‘neutrality’ and ‘objectivity’ of medical science (Viney, Callard and Woods 2015). As Susan Squier puts it, there is ‘nothing inherently literary or scientific, only what disciplinarity makes so’ (Squier 1999). So, if we can do away with the problematic framing of ‘literature’ and ‘science’ as binary opposites, in what ways can the ‘literary’ and ‘scientific’ interrelate and provoke one another?

One assumption that the critical medical humanities challenges is that of a ‘materialist’ medical science and a ‘discursive’ or ‘socially constructed’ literature. This distinction obscures the discursive mediums through which medical knowledge gets communicated as textual representations that can be analysed through literary methodologies (Squier 1999; Waugh 1997). From the other side, this distinction obscures the inescapable materiality of discourse, for the material world has a shaping effect on the literary as well as the scientific. There has been a ‘material turn’ in literary studies, with philosophers like Karen Barad calling on us to rethink certain concepts, such as the distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, and ‘matter’ and ‘meaning’, in light of discoveries in 20th Century physics (Barad 2007).

The cover of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The science of an era spills into and influences its literature, but what value might the imaginative space of literature contribute to science and medicine beyond the classic, dismissive answer of inflecting science with some ‘humanity’ or making it more accessible to the general public? Works of fiction do more than simply mirror and reproduce scientific knowledge. They open up an intermediary space through which to reflect on, question, ironise, juxtapose and re-imagine, through techniques like ‘cognitive estrangement’ (Suvin 1979). Authors like China Miévelle, Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin demonstrate how the themes and techniques of ‘fantasy’ can challenge the status quo. Meanwhile, Margaret Atwood’s ‘speculative fiction’ is by no means separate from the ‘real’ world. For Atwood, ‘speculative’ is ‘when you have all the materials to actually do it’ (Case and MacDonald 2003). Her dystopic novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) only used events that have occurred in human history .

Neither ‘literature’ nor ‘medicine’ operates in a vacuum. At this time when Atwood’s MaddAdam Trilogy seems to be becoming more of a living reality through the multiple, interrelated health and environmental crises we face, we require the widest possible ways of sharing and improving knowledge about all levels of human and planetary health. The imaginative, reflective and analytical skills of the literary are a vital component of multidisciplinary approaches, and as author Alexis Wright warns , we do without these skills at our peril.

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bates, Victoria, and Goodman, Sam. 2014. ‘Critical Conversations: Establishing Dialogue in the Medical Humanities’. In Victoria Bates, Alan Bleakley and Sam Goodman (eds), Medicine, Health and the Arts: Approaches to the Medical Humanities. Abingdon: Routledge: 3-13.

Bleakley, Alan. 2014. ‘Towards a Critical Medical Humanities’. In Medicine, Health and the Arts : 17-26.

Case, Eleanor, and Macdonald, Maggie. 2003. ‘Life After Man’. In New Scientist. https://zephr.newscientist.com/article/mg17823935-000-life-after-man/

Charon, Rita. 2000. ‘Literature and Medicine: Origins and Destinies’. In Academic Medicine , 75: 23-27.

Charon, Rita. 2006. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Evans, Maryn, and Greaves, David. 1999. ‘Exploring the Medical Humanities’. British Medical Journal 319: 1216.

Greenhalgh, Trisha and Hurwitz, Brian (eds). 1998. Narrative Based Medicine: Dialogue and Discourse in Clinical Practice. London: BMJ Press.

Levine, George (ed). 1987. One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

Lorde, Audre. 2020. The Cancer Journals. London: Penguin Books Limited.

Montgomery Hunter, Kathryn. 1991. Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.

Squier, Susan. 1999. ‘From Omega to Mr. Adam: The Importance of Literature for Feminist Science Studies’. In Science, Technology, & Human Values 24: 132-158.

Viney, William, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods. 2015. ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks’. In Medical Humanities 41 (1): 2–7.

Waugh, Patricia. 1997. ‘The New Prometheans: Literature, Criticism, and Science in the Modern and Postmodern Condition’. In European Journal of English Studies 1: 139-164.

Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods. 2016. ‘Introduction’. In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 1-31.

Whitehead, Anne. 2014. ‘The Medical Humanities: A Literary Perspective’. In Medicine, Health and the Arts : 107-127.

Woods, Angela. 2011. ‘The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities’. In Medical Humanities 37: 73-78.

Woolf, Virginia. 1947. ‘On Being Ill’. In The Moment and Other Essays . http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks15/1500221h.html#ch3

About the author

Blaise Sales is a second-year PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her PhD explores the relationship between recent models of embodied cognition and ecocritical thought in contemporary novels. Before this, she completed an MA in Medical History and Humanities at the University of York, and a BA in English at King’s College London. She is available to contact at [email protected] or on Twitter @blaise_sales.

‘MedHums 101’

Our ‘MedHums 101’ series explores the key concepts, debates and historical points of the critical medical humanities for those new to the field. View the full ‘MedHums 101’ series .

‘Gut Feeling and Digestive Health In Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture’: Book Review

Neurodivergent Humanities Network and Mentorship Programme Launch

Subject-Verb-Object: Writing with and about Multiple Sclerosis

Privacy Overview

The Medical Humanities Study Program offers a multidisciplinary opportunity for students to explore topics in medical history, ethics, theology, and other fields within the medical humanities. Students design their own research projects under the guidance of medical humanities mentors, and tailor their third year experience around the completion of this project. While some students may participate in their mentor’s ongoing research, others can pursue projects independent of (but related to) their mentor’s primary areas of interest. The Master of Arts in Bioethics and Science Policy dual degree is housed within this track.

Research: The principal component of the Medical Humanities Study Program is an in-depth research experience within the medical humanities. The location of this research will vary with the mentor and project chosen. Some projects may be appropriately pursued in libraries and archives. Others may include interviews with or experimentation upon human subjects in the clinical or other academic setting. Like their peers in the more traditional science track, medical humanities students will explore a research question, find data to support or refute it, and write a thesis that communicates their results.

Proposal: All students are expected to prepare a 3-5 page proposal by the end of spring of the second year outlining the aims of the proposed research in consultation with their chosen mentor. This proposal will state the problem to be studied, the rationale and relevance of the problem, and include a bibliography of relevant literature and sources.

Courses: Students are expected to take two courses in the medical humanities during their third year. Working with their mentor, students will identify courses within the university relevant to their research question. Courses may be chosen from the Medical School, Divinity School, or Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Individual readings courses with the mentor or other faculty may be included in the courses chosen. The student must complete two semesters devoted fully to the medical humanities field of study. The student may include relevant courses from prior study to reduce the course expectation at the discretion of the study program director, but this does not minimize the two-semester requirement of dedicated humanities study.

Lecture series: Students will attend the regular humanities lecture series offered through the Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities.

Posters: Students are expected to submit abstracts to present results in poster or oral format at the annual Alpha Omega Alpha research day.

Final Thesis: Students will prepare a thesis that fulfills the usual thesis requirements (traditional, manuscript submission or grant submission format) and that represents the product of their research. This is due on the thesis deadline date set by the Registrar’s Office.

Publication: Students are encouraged to produce work that is of sufficient originality, importance, and quality that it will be accepted for publication by a relevant medical humanities journal. Authors of historical theses will be encouraged to submit their work for the William Osler Prize awarded by the American Association of the History of Medicine for the best essay by a medical student. The winning essay of this prize contest is traditionally published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

Dual Degree Option: MD/MALS (Master of Arts in Liberal Studies) Graduate Level program for exploring diverse areas of study (social sciences, history, policy, ethics, etc.) as they relate to medicine. Students design an individual course of study that brings together their intellectual interests and professional goals. Please contact Donna Zapf, Ph.D., or Margaret Humphreys, M.D., Ph.D., for further information.

MedHum Faculty Mentors Director: Margaret Humphreys, M.D., Ph.D.

Global Health Humanities, a June Special Issue

Podcast: Brandy speaks to Narin Hassan and Jessica Howell about the June Special Issue: Global Health Humanities

This timely special issue presents research in the emerging field of Global Health Humanities. Authors hail from different disciplinary backgrounds, including Medical Humanities, literary studies, film and visual media, the history of public health, rhetoric, women’s and gender studies, medicine, and physical therapy. Their work critically engages global health histories, medical intervention and education, as well as the representation in art and culture of illness and healing in a global context. While some articles focus on specific local cultural contexts, such as the Dominican Republic, Africa, America, India, Iran, or Canada, other authors take a comparative perspective, or reflect on Global Health Humanities scholarship and its developing methodologies and priorities. Authors also think through how specific embodied experiences, such as scarf injury, transplantation, fertility and childbirth, or long-COVID, reflect the political legacies of colonialism, sexism, racism, and other contributing factors tohealth disparities such as ableism and language elitism. The co-editors, Narin Hassan and Jessica Howell, also reflect on how Global Health Humanities scholarship can respond to current unfolding health crises through responsive and self-reflective praxis.

Map of health. Credit: Odra Noel. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Narin Hassan is Associate Professor and Director of Global Media and Cultures (MS-GMC) in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is author of Diagnosing Empire: Women, Medical Knowledge, and Colonial Mobility (Ashgate, 2011). She has published essays on topics related to Victorian literature and culture, colonial/postcolonial studies, critical yoga studies, and medical humanities in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, WSQ, Mosaic, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Race and Yoga , and in a number of book collections. Her current research examines gendered conceptions of the mind, body, and spirituality in colonial contexts and within contemporary cultures of yoga. She serves as the President of INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies).

Origin of life. Credit: Odra Noel. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

BRANDY SCHILLACE: Hello and welcome back to the Medical Humanities Podcast . This is Brandy Schillace, Editor-in-Chief. And today I have with me Jessica Howell, who’s a Professor at Texas A&M, and also Narin Hassan, who is Associate Director of the graduate program in Global Media and Cultures at Georgia Tech. They have some very exciting things to tell us about Global Health Humanities, which is a special issue going to be appearing with us in June. And I also know that Jessica is head of a program from which this kind of developed. So, welcome, both of you, and maybe you can tell us all a bit more about yourselves.

HOWELL: Thank you Brandy My name is Jessica Howell. I’m Professor of English at Texas A&M University, and I’m also Associate Director for the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research where I run an initiative in Global Health Humanities. And this is essentially where the interest for this special issue grew. I’ve been a Health Humanities scholar and teacher, as well as teaching in English literature for a good bit of time. And I was noticing that there was an emerging research interest in global health in the Humanities, and I was so lucky to be joined by Narin Hassan, Narin Hassan as my Co-Editor. Narin, did you want to introduce yourself?

NARIN HASSAN: Yes, thank you. I am Narin Hassan. I am an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. And as Brandy mentioned, I’m also a Director of a new graduate program that’s a collaborative program between my department, which is Literature, Media, Communication and the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech. And it’s a collaborative program called Global Media and Cultures. And my work is largely looking at the 19th century and intersections of gender, health, and colonialism in the 19th century. And I was lucky as a graduate student to actually be a graduate student at the University of Rochester, which had a Medical Humanities program, one of the early programs at their medical school. So, as a graduate student, I taught a number of courses in that Medical Humanities program and then continued to do some research in that area.

SCHILLACE: Yeah, and that’s exciting. Actually, I know a bit about the Rochester program, and that’s kind of exciting too. I think one of the things that interests me about what our project here at Medical Humanities , we define it quite broadly. And I know that in some areas, right, people think of Medical Humanities as coming, as really being about literature in medicine, which it sometimes is, or narrative medicine, which it sometimes is, but it’s much broader than that. And so, here at Medical Humanities , we have people from anthropology, history, literature, the medical sciences, social science, social justice all coming together. And so, that’s one of the reasons why I found your proposal for a Global Health Humanities special issue so intriguing is that it does have a broad base. So, I wondered if you could say a bit more. I know that kind of came out of some of the work you were both already doing. How did you bring it together, and what can people expect from this special issue when it hits this June?

HOWELL: Sure. Well, we essentially met through our common networks in 19th Century Studies. I also study literature of empire, health, and the environment. And so, Narin and I knew each other through those networks, and it was through Narin’s previous work and her interest in Health Humanities that we decided to form this collaboration. If we can define the Health Humanities as understanding cultural practices and products related to health and illness, this special issue is really poised to embrace a global turn to understanding these kinds of practices in a global context. So, we do think of it really broadly in terms of different forms of human expression, which of course, very much include literature and literary forms, but also film and visual media, the history of specific terms and concepts related to global health as well as Global Health Humanities as a field itself, and how it articulates itself in relationship to Health Humanities and in relationship to the history of the Medical Humanities as a field. So, there’s also a kind of self-reflective quality to some of the articles that are appearing in this special issue to think about how is Global Health Humanities differing from Health Humanities? How is it innovating? And then also, what are its relevant kind of scholarly backgrounds and traditions that inform the practice?

SCHILLACE: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

HASSAN: I’ll just add that when Jessica contacted me, it was a sort of follow-up to a conference that we were both at, the Interdisciplinary 19th Century Studies Conference. So, it was back in 2019. And at that conference, I had organized a roundtable on teaching race and empire in the 19th century that Jessica attended. And she kind of followed up after the conference. And so, I just wanted to add that both of us are sort of coming from backgrounds that are historical and also literary and cultural, but we also see in our issue and think it’s really important to represent scholars from a variety of fields. So, Jessica has mentioned the various fields that are represented, but also, scholars who are doing different kinds of work. So, there’s pieces that are sort of looking, that are like teams working on particular topics. There are single-authored pieces. There’s scholars coming from different methodological places and backgrounds, but also scholars coming from a variety of different stages of their careers.

SCHILLACE: Right.

HASSAN: So, that was something we were really trying to do with the issue is, I think our goal was to take the broad approach in as many ways as possible and to sort of think about expanding the field and expanding the ways in which we think about the terms “global” and “health” and “humanities.”

HOWELL: Right.

SCHILLACE: Yeah, I appreciate that because, here at MH , one of the things that we’ve been working hard on and we just launched this year, officially launched, we’ve been practicing working on it already, is path to publication, which is an attempt to broaden out who can submit, effectively, a special issue. Because it is a lot of hard work as you can both attest to.

SCHILLACE: Getting published if you are from, say, the Global South and you don’t have the access to opening or even reading some of the essays that we have, if they’re behind paywalls, or you’re not being asked to be part of those conversations, yet you’re spoken about, but not necessarily heard from. And so, we’ve been trying to expose, there’s a lot about publishing that is unfortunately exclusionary, and we’re trying to make it more inclusive. And one of the ways of doing that is creating special issues that allow people time and gestation and a community to surround that, to help all of the articles be stronger. And so, I think you guys experienced that as well. I wanna say it was almost, what, almost two years that you worked on this prior to publication?

HOWELL: Yeah, the inception of it was even before then. And I should say before we turn to thinking about how it has tracked, a very, a time of global upheaval and a time when global health has become of even more urgent interest in conversation, I just wanted to mention that though we have this diversity in terms of both the professional development of our different authors as well as the areas that they discuss. So, we have articles that are about the Dominican Republic, Africa, America, India, Iran, Canada, and the Mediterranean, and we have scholars that are in universities not based in America, for example, in the UK. So, there’s that kind of representation of diversity.

But there’s also, I would say, a kind of cross-cutting aspect which we explore in our introduction that many of the articles, that they come from different disciplinary and methodological backgrounds. Many of them engage cross-cutting topics like health inequity, access to care in a global context, gendered health disparities, the legacies of colonialism in terms of kind of neocolonial health infrastructure, and then also human health and displacement and the refugee experience, as well as the emerging, current, and very urgent topic of COVID-19 and the Health Humanities. And so, there are these cross-cutting, I would say, inquiries and interests that are really what we would call outlining the key considerations of Global Health Humanities as an emerging field. But then before we, I wanted to turn over to Narin to talk about how it’s been a long-standing project, but also one that’s been evolving in real time.

SCHILLACE: Mmhmm.

HASSAN: Yeah. I tried to go back and kind of look at the timeline be cause it all seems so far away now! But it was back in, I guess, March 2019 that Jessica and I were both at the same conference, and she contacted me soon after. And it was around May 2019 that we started to think about the call and started to get some of that out there. So, it was right around the beginning of 2020 that we actually received the initial drafts. And then, of course, a lot of things changed as we hit spring 2020, which was a year in the project. And Jessica and I kept sort of feeling like the longer we were in the pandemic moment, we had to keep sort of rethinking and resituating the project itself and the kinds of questions we were trying to pose. So, we went through a very long process of sort of digging through different layers of, okay, where are we going with this? How can we look at the global and the local in this moment? How could we think about the different clusters and sections that we have? How are they changing? So, when we initially thought about the project, issues of migration and the refugee question, there was sort of a core section that was focused on that. And then we realized we really needed to address the pandemic.

And so, we went through a lot of different processes of, how do we add sections to this? How do we reframe what we actually have? And along the way, I mean, another thing that sort of went on over the course of the last three years is we were also addressing our own experience of isolation, all of the sort of disruptions of 2020. We were dealing with a lot of that from our contributors. We really had to change the way that we were working and thinking. We were dealing with our own sort of stress around aging parents, health issues. So, there were a lot of ways that this sort of personal kind of just jumped in and that the moment really impacted where the project was going. And it really has felt like a whole sort of process of layering is the word that keeps coming to mind, building and then reshaping that has happened in the last three years.

SCHILLACE: It’s really interesting. I’ve been working with and talking to Stuart Murray, who’s also on the Board of Medical Humanities , Editorial Board of Medical Humanities . And they’re working on a project right now with the Wellcome, and we are trying to help track it in real time through podcasts to say like, because projects evolve. And so, it’s interesting. We’ve just done that, really, with you, and this project has evolved. Unfortunately, we didn’t document it the way we’re trying to do with Stuart Murray’s project. But I think that there’s a reality, there’s an illusion that these projects sort of arrive fully formed, then are sent to publishers, and then just suddenly arrive in publication and print, when in fact, there’s so much shaping that goes on from my end, as an editor, but also from the guest editors before the papers get to me, and then again through the revision processes, through the helpful comments of people who are readers and engage with the work. And that continues to go on because the blog is open for people to respond to the special issue after it publishes. So, I think, hopefully we are seeing the end of the imaginary sort of ivory tower, fully formed ideas springing from the forehead of Zeus, and it’s much more of a collaborative and communal process.

HOWELL: Yeah. And I think that in fact we, in the introduction as well as in, as you say, the process of revision with all of the contributors, we tried to make this self-reflective, evolving process of scholarship actually the topic. So, rather than trying to gloss it over, but instead, we realized that Health Humanities scholarship can really embrace that self-reflexivity of saying, “How do I think about autonomy differently? How do I think of vulnerability differently? How do I think of global interconnection differently?”

So, in fact, in one of the series of revisions, when we gave feedback to the authors, if their essays were not about COVID-19 explicitly, but they mentioned the pandemic as an emerging context to their work, we asked them to actually kind of deepen that inquiry and say, “What is my positionality in relationship to the pandemic? What do I bring to my consideration of this emerging crisis?” And so, and just as you say, in the introduction, we actually reflect back, Narin and I do, on the different changes that the issue has undergone. So, I think that one of the really promising potentialities within Health Humanities research is to—and COVID-19 has brought this into really stark relief—is to make the process of self-reflection and embodiment actually the topic of scholarship, not just the background.

SCHILLACE: Absolutely. I think it’s a process of showing your work, really. And that is something, if I may say, and I think your issue is emblematic of this, or at least representative of this, that that illusion, that sense of a fully formed project is also one that carries with it a lot of white, Western, and often masculine baggage. There used to be a kind of academic expectation that you didn’t show these things. They were considered weaknesses instead of diversity.

HOWELL: Mmhmm.

SCHILLACE: The diversity was considered a weakness instead of a strength. That there was a point at which you would never, bring your, oh, well, you’re ill. You don’t talk about that. Or you have sick parents. You don’t talk about that. And I am 100 percent against us laying that to rest because we are human beings. We are a community. Pretending that we don’t have these struggles is deeply injurious, especially to, I think, early career scholars who feel like they have to somehow fall in line or ape this kind of behavior. And so, it’s really powerful. And I, again, I think you’re right. I think COVID has driven this home even further for us to realize yeah, you know, we are wearing shorts under the table on that Zoom call. [chuckles] You know, we, like, it’s just, it’s just a thing. We’re living beings.

HOWELL: Mmhmm. Yeah, absolutely. And coping with loss and also acknowledging people’s relative positions of privilege when that exists, right? That our stressors are different than the stressors that some of our colleagues across the globe are dealing with. So, all of that opportunity and responsibility really, I think, is brought to light by the topic of global health and the Humanities.

HASSAN: Yeah, I’ll just add that I feel like that is what has made the project sort of deeper and in terms of just sort of thinking about process. This was an amazing collaborative experience for me because Jessica and I don’t know each other that well, like just from seeing each other at conferences, and had never collaborated before. But once we were in 2020 and sort of going through the bulk of this project in the last two years, we did so much through Zoom, and we became so good at that, right?!

HOWELL: [laughs]

HASSAN: And our meetings became a really great space of connection, but also, we did a lot of writing while on Zoom. So, the process itself was unfolding during the pandemic, and we were able to use Google Docs and Zoom and all of these other forums to continue with the project. But those spaces also became spaces for us to be more open with each other about who we are as human beings, how we are caregivers, how we are giving in many different ways, and how the stresses of the moment are really bringing that to the core. So, as much as this is clearly, you know, it’s an academic project, we’re working with a group of scholars, there’s a lot that’s sort of around all that that we were trying to also address, right, to really think about who we are in this moment, working in this way, and trying to bring some of these questions to the world in a different way.

SCHILLACE: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I was wondering, since we have just this space to entice people to come and read the essays involved, what are some things that you hope people will be excited to see? What are some topics that you want to encourage? This is kind of our sales pitch as well. This is a great special issue. What should people come for, and what should they stay for?

HOWELL: Well, we can maybe take turns. Narin, I can talk about, there’s several different clusters, and so, we can talk about the highlights from each. And I’ll just start off by saying that the first cluster we have of essays is titled Nation, Biopolitics, and Narrative and thinks about the biopolitical links between global health and colonial history, specifically by focusing on reading literary text and film. So, we have an opening essay by Sandhya Shetty thinking about Katherine Mayo’s Mother India in terms of global health and security. And she does a really careful close reading of that novel, in particular thinking about Indian bodies and spaces. And then we have, continuing with the focus on India and representation, we have Meenakshi Srihari’s essay, which thinks about narrative arcs of organ transplantation within literature and film. So, we start out by thinking about how, as Narin mentioned before, you can bridge kind of local and global considerations by thinking about a particular representation of a particular place, which is India, in terms of both written and visual texts. The final essay in the first cluster is by Matthew Spencer and Lava Asaad, which weaves issues of migration and representation by thinking about a doctor’s experience in literature, working with refugees, and narrating that experience through memoir. And then maybe Narin, do you want to talk about women’s health?

HASSAN: Okay, great. So, yeah, our second section is on women’s health in global context. And in that section, we have an essay by Anna Kemball, which looks at American Indian birth experiences and speculative fiction. And then we have a piece by Anna Tupetz and a whole team of researchers who are working on looking at female scarf injuries in Bangladesh. And so, those two pieces are taking really different approaches. One is more of sort of Gender Studies, Literary Studies scholarship. The other one is a little bit more anthropological and is sort of a more practice-based sort of project. And then do you wanna go on to the next one, Jessica, which is more on global concepts and history and politics?

HOWELL: Sure. So, as I mentioned in the introductory conversation, we wanted to make sure to have a section that was dedicated to where some of the key terms and concepts related to global health and the Humanities have come from, what are their legacies. And so, we have an article by Mari Webel on the history of the concept of neglected tropical diseases. So, she thinks about how, within a historical framework, this term of “neglected tropical diseases” has arisen through history and how it relates to public health institution and discourse. Brenda Wilson further then thinks about how in Kenya, again, in a more applied setting in this case, how language elitism affects maternal health outcomes in Kenya. And then finally, Raquel Baldwinson thinks about what our responsibilities are as Health Humanities scholars when we engage with the field of global health and what kinds of critical tendencies she sees arising in the global health communities, and how those need to kind of remain nuanced in understanding the real lived challenges that people are facing around the globe in terms of their health crises. And so, this section really focuses on zooming out, if you will, to think a bit about where we are and where we’ve come from in terms of key terms and concepts around global health.

SCHILLACE: Nice.

HASSAN: Yeah. I’ll just end with the last section is called COVID-19 and the Future of Health Humanities . And those questions of sort of nuance and zooming out sort of continue in this section. This is a section that we added later on in 2020. And there are two pieces in this section, and both of them are really getting us to think about COVID-19 and how the questions of this moment sort of ask us to think ahead or to rethink the ways that we’ve thought about terms and thought about Health Humanities. So, the first piece is by Rosemary Jolly, and that essay is looking at contact zones and political and environmental histories in relation to global health. And the last essay is by Jessica, Jessica Howell. And that piece is looking at literary and historical contexts as a way to think about contemporary health futures. So, we end the collection with that piece as a sort of looking back, but also looking forward and sort of thinking about the broader theoretical questions that are at stake and the different ways that we can think about the terms that we’ve been addressing throughout the collection.

SCHILLACE: That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful.

HOWELL: Yeah, and one of the methodologies, I think, that this final section offers is thinking about how something like oral history or interviewing can become part of Health Humanities scholarship, where, well, it already is, but how it can grow in real time to think about people’s lived experiences during a time like the pandemic. So, what could we do in terms of creating interviews and texts out of people’s lived experiences and then incorporating those into Health Humanities scholarship?

SCHILLACE: No, I think they’re all really wonderful pieces, and I think we’ve been very lucky to get them in and get them through. It’s particularly that you sort of had to add on. I mean, you guys met in the halcyon days before COVID-19, and yet you managed through the course of this process to get those topics in as well. And I think that is something that we do try to build in at MH by having these longer gestation periods for special issues, is the opportunity to address real-time issues that are happening unexpectedly in the middle of everything else. And I think that that’s a strength. That’s a real strength of the issue.

I am so glad both of you could join me today, and I really want everyone to check out the upcoming special issue. Also, our blog, which is very robust and is treated almost like its own online publication in some ways is carrying lay descriptions provided by the authors for the pieces that appear. And so, it also helps broaden the conversation out to non-specialist audiences. So, and that’s not behind a paywall. So, please do join us for this wonderful special issue on Global Health Humanities. And also check out the work of our guests today. Is there anything you want to leave us with?

HOWELL: Oh, I think that this issue is also an invitation for further collaboration between Humanities scholars and those who are health practitioners in a global context to think about how individuals’ stories and experiences can be incorporated into our understanding and practice of global health.

SCHILLACE: Well, thank you again. Thank you both, and thanks to all of our listeners for being part of the conversation.

Analysis and discussion of research | Updates on the latest issues | Open debate

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BMJ Journals

Journal of Medical Humanities - What We Publish

Scholarly Articles addressing health humanities topics as defined in the Aims and Scope. These submissions can be up to 10,000 words excluding references and abstract. Formatting typically follows humanities long-form scholarly genres, with an introduction, theoretical framing and brief literature review, discussion of the topic with (textual) evidence and argumentation, and a conclusion speaking to transdisciplinary health humanities concerns.
Review Essays covering at least two and up to four recently published books on a topic of interest. These submissions can be up to 6,000 words excluding references and abstract. Authors should submit a query to the editor via email to confirm the journal’s interest in publishing a review essay on the identified books. Review essays should specifically address how the books in question contribute to health humanities scholarship and/or teaching.
Educational Research Articles about Humanities in Health Professions Education or graduate or baccalaureate Health Humanities Programs. These submissions can be up to 7,500 words excluding references and abstract. Educational research articles should contribute to theory and/or methodology in health humanities education research or report on large-scale studies of the state of the field, rather than demonstrate a successful program or argue for the value of humanities in medical or health professions education. (Introducing innovative activities or curricula can be accomplished under Innovations in Health Humanities, described below.)
Forum Essays are collections of 2-4 short pieces that address circulating “big questions” in the field (for example, what is the role of suffering in medical student experience?) or theoretical framings (for example, political economy and health humanities). Authors should submit a query to the editor via email to confirm the journal’s interest in the topic. Each forum essay can be up to 2,000 words and 10 references. The collection should be submitted as a single submission with one corresponding author and abstract.
Short Takes: Innovations in Health Humanities are essays of up to 2,000 words excluding references that (1) describe innovations in health humanities education or (2) interpret artifacts, documents, or media, including visual arts, with the purpose of introducing them to the journal’s readership for teaching or research purposes. These essays need not provide a literature review or detailed description of research methods. They are meant to be rigorous but less formal scholarly interventions written in engaging prose with the intention of keeping readers up-to-date with developments in the field or emerging methods and ideas. Examples in this genre include descriptions of curricular innovations with brief comments about added value, reports on health humanities program development in global contexts, and descriptive interpretations of literary texts or films and their potential to contribute to research or teaching. Please provide an abstract of 150 to 250 words
Creative Engagements include essays of up to 1,500 words or a series of photographs or other visual representations, including comics, that creatively engage with the field’s enduring and emerging questions. These submissions may have up to five references and do not need an abstract. This is a highly selective feature. Authors should clearly describe in their cover letter what makes their work innovative, distinct, and important to the field.
Poetry that illuminates the primary foci of health humanities scholarship. For example, we seek poems that explore, critique, and/or record the experiences of illness, healing, embodiment, mortality, loss, disability, diversity, caregiving, health education, and medical practice.
Brief Critical Reviews of books or media of interest to the journal’s readership. Reviews can be up to 1,200 words if they cover one work. Authors should send an email query to the Book Review editor, Tony Miksanek ( [email protected] ) if they intend to submit a review to confirm the journal’s interest in publishing the review.

Please note: our readers are trained in a variety of disciplines, so scholarship focused on narrow disciplinary arguments or which utilize field-specific jargon are not likely to be accepted for publication. Articles that are extremely technical are not likely to be of interest to JMH readers.

All submissions undergo two anonymous peer reviews, except book reviews and forum essays, both of which are reviewed by the editors.

Queries can be sent to Bernice L. Hausman, Editor-in-Chief, at [email protected].

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WashU Libraries

History of science, medicine, and technology.

Find articles, etc.
Scholarly societies
Selected sites & bibliography
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Collection Development Policy
MedH 385 - What is Medical Humanities?
HIST 361 - Topics in History & Technology: A History of Information
HIST 4885 - Advanced Seminar: Medicine, Disease, and Empire
HIST 3067 - History of Madness
MedH 3001 - Philosophy of Medicine
MedH 3033 - Religion and Healing
HIST 3672 Medicine, Healing and Experimentation in the Contours of Black History
HIST/MedH 4909 - Advanced Seminar: HIstory of the Body
HIST 3608 - Science and Society in Modern South Asia

Reference Works for Background Reading

Oxford Encyclopedia of the History of American Science, Medicine, and Technology - " The entries in this encyclopedia explore the changing character of science, medicine, and technology in the United States; the key individuals, institutions, and organizations responsible for major developments; and the concepts, practices, and processes underlying these changes...The encyclopedia situates specific events, theories, practices, and institutions in their proper historical context and explores their impact on American society and culture. Entries are written by experts in the field." - publisher's website

Oxford Research Encyclopedias - new comprehensive collections of in-depth, peer-reviewed summaries on an ever-growing range of topics (African History, Economics and Finance, Literature, American History, Education, Natural Hazard Science, Asian History, Social Work, Neuroscience , Business and Management, Environmental Science, Oxford Classical Dictionary , Climate Science, International Studies, Politics, Communication, Latin American History , Psychology , Criminology and Criminal Justice , Linguistics, and Religion).

The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine Fifth ed. (2015) - comprehensive resource for consumers interested in health information. It provides health and medical information on approximately 2,000 topics, including health issues of global importance. Entries do not use technical jargon, making them easier to understand. The encyclopedia is extremely thorough, well organized, and enhanced with color photos and illustrations. Related entries and resource lists give readers suggestions for further research, and organizations listed can provide additional assistance.

Magill's Medical Guide 7 th ed. (2014) – provid[es] general readers with the most authoritative yet accessible reference source that helps bridge the gap between medical encyclopedias and dictionaries for professionals and popular self-help guides. A perfect mix of accessibility and depth…” – from the publisher’s website

Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures - as the title suggests, this encyclopedia is inclusive of scientific, technological and medical accomplishments of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. Each entry includes bibliographic reference to assist in further reading and sourcing.

Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology: Health and Illness in the World's Cultures (2004) - the first reference work to describe the cultural practices relevant to health in the world's cultures and to provide an overview of important topics in medical anthropology. More than 100 experts - anthropologists and other social scientists - have contributed their firsthand experience of medical cultures from around the world. - from the publisher's website

Health and Medicine through History: From Ancient Practices to 21st-Century Innovations (2019) - a comprehensive (1,127 pages) yet concise global exploration of health and medicine from ancient times to the present day, helping readers to trace the development of concepts and practices around the world (eBook)

Oxford Bibliographies - these authoritative research guides combine the best features of an annotated bibliography with a high-level encyclopedia across a variety of subject areas. Subject areas include: African American Studies , American Literature, Anthropology , Art History, Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, British and Irish Literature, Cinema and Media Studies, Classics, Evolutionary Biology, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Linguistics, Literary and Critical Theory, Medieval Studies, Philosophy , Psychology , Renaissance and Reformation, Social Work, Sociology, and Victorian Literature.

The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (1993) - title link is of for the eBook; also in print ) - traces the concept of disease throughout history and in each major world region. It offers the history and geography of each significant human disease--both historical and contemporary--from AIDS to yellow fever, and touches on the variety of approaches that different medical traditions have used to fight disease. Accessible to lay people and specialists alike

Journal of Medical Biography (London: Royal Society of Medicine, 1993-2012) - focuses on the lives of people in or associated with medicine, those considered legendary as well as the less well known. The journal includes much original research about figures from history and their afflictions

Books for the Medical Humanities

Brian Dolan, Humanitas: Readings in the Development of the Medical Humanities (2015) - This reader reprints critical essays published over the course of a 100-year history that grapple with the challenges of defining and justifying the presence of humanities instruction in medical education...with a comprehensive historiographical introduction." - - publisher's website

Thomas R. Cole et al, Medical Humanities: An Introduction (2015) - "Using concepts and methods of the humanities, the book addresses undergraduate and premed students, medical students, and students in other health professions, as well as physicians and other healthcare practitioners. It encourages them to consider the ethical and existential issues related to the experience of disease, care of the dying, health policy, religion and health, and medical technology." - publisher's website

Paul Crawford et al, Health Humanities (2015) - "This is the first manifesto for health humanities worldwide. It sets out the context for this emergent and innovative field which extends beyond medical humanities to advance the inclusion and impact of the arts and humanities in healthcare, health and well-being." - Google Books summary

Sander Gilman, Illness and Image: Case Studies in the Medical Humanities (2015) - case studies include: circumcision, face transplants, posture, obesity, pain, madness, self-harm, race, and death

Therese Jones et al, Health Humanities Reader (2014) - "consists of nearly 50 chapters, some of which deal with classic medical humanities topics, such as the notions of health and disease and the theory of the body. The majority of the book centers on more contemporary issues, such as gender and sexuality, disability, and aging. The depth and rigor of the collection are equally varied as the style and genre of writing (academic essays to short plays, poems, and comics .) Novices or students may prefer to first develop a solid body of knowledge of the medical humanities to fully appreciate the richness of this collection ..." review by P. Rodriguez del Pozo, MD, JD, PhD, Weill Cornell Medical College (Qatar), for Choice

Journals for the Medical Humanities

Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1939-present) - As the official publication of the American Association for the History of Medicine ( AAHM ) and the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine, the Bulletin is a leading journal in its field spanning the social, cultural, and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide. WUSTL Libraries owns the full run but it is split between JSTOR and Project MUSE .

Journal of Medical Humanities (1979-present) - publishes original interdisciplinary studies on the history, philosophy, and bioethics in the medical and behavioral sciences as well as pedagogical perspectives explaining what and how knowledge is made and valued in medicine, how that knowledge is expressed and transmitted, and the ideological basis of medical education. WashU Libraries' access is spread across Academic Search Complete , Springerlink Contemporary, as well as print editions for years prior to 1997 (starting with v.10 in 1989).

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (1976-) - Published by Oxford University Press, J. Med. Philos . is a flagship, international scholarly journal in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine. WashU Libraries has print editions from v.7-33 (1982-2008) and electronic versions from the first issue through 1995 in Oxford Journals 2018 Humanities Archive and from 1996 to present in Oxford Journals A-Z Collection . If you search Academic Search Complete , you will only find articles from 1997 to one year ago.

Medical History (1957-present) - is an international journal for the history of medicine and related sciences published by Cambridge University Press. All issues can be found through PubMed Central .

Medical Humanities (2000-present) - Published on behalf of the Institute of Medical Ethics and the British Medical Association. All issues can be found through BMJ Journals and should not be confused with

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (1957-present) - is an interdisciplinary journal from the Johns Hopkins University Press which publishes essays that place biological and medical topics within broad scientific, social, or humanistic contexts for scientists, physicians, students, and scholars. All issues are available through Project MUSE .

Social History of Medicine (1988- ) - is the journal for the Society for the Social History of Medicine and is published by Oxford University Press. It began publication in 1970 as the Bulletin for the Social History of Medicine and publishes cutting-edge research on the history of all aspects of health, illness and medical treatment in the past, from antiquity to the present. WashU Libraries only has access to issues from 1988 to present.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Part C, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - (1998-present) is published by Elsevier and is devoted to historical, sociological, philosophical and ethical aspects of the life and environmental sciences, of the sciences of mind and behavior, and of the medical and biomedical sciences and technologies.WashU Libraries has access to all issues through Science Direct Journals .

Additional Journal Databases

History of Science, Medicine, and Technology integrates four bibliographies: the Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science, the Current Bibliography in the History of Technology, the Bibliografia Italiana di Storia della Scienza, and the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. It is updated on a monthly basis and includes bibliographic records for records of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, dissertations, serials, maps, and other related materials.

History databases America: History & Life (1964-) contains only journals related history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.

Historical Abstracts (1955- ) covers world history from 1450 to the present

Philosophy databases

PhilPapers is a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers. We monitor all sources of research content in philosophy, including journals, books, open access archives, and personal pages maintained by academics. We also host the largest open access archive in philosophy.

Medical databases

PubMed (1946 - ) - includes over 3,500 journals published internationally, covering all areas of medicine. Includes the entire Medline database (1966+) PLUS PreMedline (recent articles that are not yet fully indexed for Medline) and links to publisher full-text web sites and other databases.

Hein Online - more than 900 searchable full-text law journals and many legal resources, including the Code of Federal Regulations, United States Code, and U.S. Statutes at Large. Campus-wide access is due to subscription by the WU Law Library.

Classics Resources

Classics Librarian Christie Peters Research Guide to Classics

Multidisciplinary databases

JSTOR - multidisciplinary, a lot of full text articles, but subject headings are too broad

Academic Search Complete (1975-present) - multidisciplinary; subject headings may or may not be LCSH; also made by EBSCO, so overlaps with America: History & Life

JSTOR v. Academic Search Complete

Google Scholar - articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. While Google Scholar itself is free on the web, many of the citations it references are not.

Primo - is a "discovery tool" that searches WUSTL's library catalog as well as a number of newspaper and journal databases at one time, but it doesn't retrieve all of their content nor does it search all databases

Google Scholar v. Primo

Project MUSE - a comprehensive collection of peer reviewed, interdisciplinary journals from leading university presses, not-for-profit publishers and prestigious scholarly societies.

Scopus - The world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Contains over 46 million records, 70% with abstracts, and also includes over 4.6 million conference papers.

Primary Sources

State Medical Society Journals - this collection encompasses nearly 50 state medical journals published between and 1844 annd 2017 and is hosted by the Internet Archive. The older editions could be considered primary sources, as they reflect the historical perspective of the medical profession in their time.

Making of Modern Law collections include: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926; Trials, 1600-1926; Foreign, Comparative and International Law, 1600-1926; Foreign Primary Sources, 1600-1970; Primary Sources, 1620-1926, and U.S. Supreme Court Records and Briefs, 1832-1978.

Medical Heritage Library is a collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, collaboratively curated from among some of the world’s leading medical libraries and made available through the Internet Archive.

Early American Medical Imprints; A guide to works printed in the United States, 1668-1820 - published in 1961 and compiled by the thirty-five year cataloguer at the National Library of Medicine, it contains every medical work, even some material pertaining to veterinary medicine, vital statistics and medical legislation, published in the U.S. for the period described in the title.

Hathi Trust - a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via the Google Books project and Internet Archive digitization initiatives as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

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Relevant, Relatable: The Role of Humanities in Neurology

Andrew N. Wilner, MD; Heidi Moawad, MD

Authors and Disclosures

Disclosure: Andrew N. Wilner, MD, has disclosed the following relevant financial relationships: Serve(d) as a director, officer, partner, employee, advisor, consultant, or trustee for: Accordant Health Services,  a CVS Caremark Co. Receives Royalties for  The Locum Life: A Physician's Guide to Locum Tenens  (Lulu Publishing)

Disclosure: Heidi Moawad, MD, has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Andrew N. Wilner, MD: Welcome to Medscape. I'm Dr Andrew Wilner, and my guest today is Dr Heidi Moawad. Heidi is a fellow neurologist and associate editor of the humanities section of the journal Neurology . Heidi is also an editorial board member of Neurology Clinical Practice and past editor-in-chief of Neurology Times . Welcome, Heidi.

Heidi Moawad, MD: Thank you so much for having me.

Wilner: Today, I'd like to focus on your role in publication in the humanities. Tell me, how did you get interested in that?

Moawad: I've always been interested in writing. I've been involved as a reviewer for several of the neurology journals over the years. The humanities section had a little bit of reorganization a few years ago, so there are three humanities editors. I am the handling editor, so I'm the one that looks at the reviewers and what they've written and puts that all together to make the final conclusion.

Wilner: Do the humanities belong in a scientific neurology journal? I think there's been some debate about that.

Moawad: That's a really good question. I think that the data tell us the answer to that, which is that it is a very popular section. When we have the online statistics, many people click on the humanities and read this section. We do know that it's very popular. We do know that neurologists really like it. I think that's the most clear answer, really, rather than thinking about should it or shouldn't it be there. The fact that so many people want to read it is our answer.

Tips to Get Published

Wilner: I have a personal interest. I'm the course director for humanities for our medical school here at University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, and humanities and medicine has been an interest of mine for a long time. I want some inside information now. If one of my students, for example, wanted to submit an article on the humanities, what would increase the likelihood that it would get published?

Moawad: There are a few things that we look for. One is that it has to do with neurology. We do get many submissions that are wonderful pieces, but they have to do with either life in general, medicine in general, work-life balance, or these kinds of things. If they're not specific to neurology, we're not going to accept them.

The reason for that is that we get so many submissions that we have to really focus on those that are relevant to neurology. That's one thing. It has to be relevant to neurology.

It has to be something that in some way deepens the connection between neurologists or between neurologists and patients. What I mean by that is it has to be relatable. What humanities does is it builds community. It makes us feel like we are part of something.

Sometimes people do write for themselves, journaling or writing a poem or something like that and never share it, right? Those things that are shared are the things that make us understand how other people feel. The way other people feel is something we can learn about if we don't feel the same way, or something we can connect with if we do feel the same way. It's usually some kind of combination of learning something about how others are experiencing life and neurology, and also recognizing that same thing that we are experiencing as well.

Relevant to neurology, relatable, and also kind. No stereotypes or something that would be mean or insulting to an individual or a population.

The last thing, which is probably the hardest, is well written. Not something that seems like someone just did it in 5 minutes.

Wilner: Is there just one humanities article per issue?

Moawad: No. Sometimes there might be just one, and sometimes there might be two or three. We don't accept it based on numbers.

Wilner: You mentioned that it was highly competitive. What percentage of articles do you actually publish that are submitted?

Moawad: Oh, gosh. I'm thinking it's less than 50%, but I don't have the exact number.

Wilner: It's not less than 1%, for example.

Moawad: No, it's not like that.

Wilner: It's a reasonable expectation that at least if you submit, it will be carefully reviewed and there's half a chance.

Moawad: Yes. The carefully reviewed is another important thing. The reviewers give very specific comments and feedback, even for submissions that are not going to be accepted. For the most part, we'll either say this is not appropriate for this journal, but if it is, and it just isn't acceptable, there's usually going to be some suggestions of how to improve it.

Unless there's something about it that's really offensive or very much not original, you can find it anywhere, then we're unlikely to give very specific feedback. If it's offensive, we're unlikely to give specific feedback, but we will at least mention that.

We're not going to just leave people totally hanging. If they really want to keep trying, they can revise it, they can address the reviewer's concerns, and they can resubmit several times if they're really devoted to this piece.

Wilner: There can be some back and forth with the journal. It's not just yea or nay and try your luck elsewhere.

Moawad: A big thing that I always think about is that I do care about my readers, but I also care about my authors. When you have a humanities piece published, your name is on that for a long time. Your colleagues are going to see that. Potentially patients could look it up.

I really care that I'm not going to accept something that will reflect poorly on the author. Sometimes authors may not see that, but it's actually even more important to me that I take care of my authors than I take care of my readers.

Many times, rejection is because I don't think, in the long term, someone will want their name associated with that piece they submitted, even if they feel it very deeply. This is something that they're putting out into the world.

Fiction vs Nonfiction

Wilner: I believe at the American Academy of Neurology, recently, you spoke about this topic. Is there anything you'd like to add?

Moawad: We had two talks at the national meeting. One of them was talking about what are we looking for; how people can get published; and what kind of pieces, should they be fiction or nonfiction — these kinds of things. Anything that's nonfiction has to de-identify patients. We did talk about those kind of logistics.

We also had a workshop where we had attendees write poems and share them. It wasn't required to share them. That was very popular, really well liked. Many people wrote poems from the heart. They all thought that they could have probably revised them if they had more time, but it was a really enjoyable and fun experience and really built a sense of community between everybody.

Wilner: It sounds like the journal's getting a little less stodgy than I remember.

Moawad: In neurology, there's clinical research and basic science research. That's never going to go away, and that's what's going to keep our specialty moving forward to help patients in the future.

Of course, this other aspect, the humanities, is just another piece that you can't totally ignore because people really want it. It makes people feel heard and understood, and it helps people understand others. I think it's more of adding like a 360° viewpoint of neurology.

Wilner: Heidi, that's really encouraging. I expect as soon as this program is published, there's going to be a bounce in submissions.

Moawad: Probably, yes. Whenever we have a program, we do get many submissions, which is always welcome. It's wonderful to see them.

Wilner: Dr Heidi Moawad, I want to thank you for your insights on publications in the humanities.

Moawad: Thank you.

Wilner: I'm Dr Andrew Wilner, reporting for Medscape.

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Medical Humanities (Online)

September 2025
September 2024

6 months part-time

Course details

This exciting and challenging online course applies the knowledge and insight of the humanities and social sciences to gain a deeper understanding of what is meant by health and illness outside of a medical context and, in particular, to analyse how our thoughts and physical experiences become recognised as symptoms.

The course provides Masters-level education across two modules and leads to a postgraduate qualification after six months. It is suitable if you studied subjects such as Anthropology, English, Geography, Law, Modern Languages and Cultures, Philosophy, Sociology, and related disciplines at undergraduate level. You may also benefit if you have a background in health and social care and are looking to bring humanities and social sciences perspectives to bear in your professional practice.

You will study two core modules from the Medical Humanities MA: Concepts and Frameworks in the Critical Medical Humanities, and Reimagining Health Research. As you progress through the course you will learn about key health challenges, focusing on debates about the wider social, political and economic environments in which health, illness and medicine are situated. You will also develop advanced skills in interpreting and using different kinds of data, from textual and material sources to data gathered through qualitative methods.

Upon completion, you may have the option of applying to the MA, where you will study two further modules and write a dissertation.

The course is led by the University’s Institute for Medical Humanities and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and you will be taught by specialists from across the University. The interdisciplinary nature of the course provides a fascinating and comprehensive introduction to the wide range of approaches to health taken by different academic disciplines.

When you enrol on this course, you will become a member of the Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers (PGECR) network in Medical Humanities, which organises regular seminars, conferences and social events.

Course structure

Core modules:.

Concepts and Frameworks in the Critical Medical Humanities provides advanced training in the interdisciplinary field of critical medical humanities and strengthens your understanding of both its development from the less complex context of initial medical humanities study and its distinct contribution to health research and current challenges. This module will also build your knowledge of concepts, theories and approaches essential to research in the critical medical humanities.

Reimagining Health Research: Methodologies in the Critical Medical Humanities equips you with the advanced knowledge and skills needed to critically appraise key health research methodologies used in the critical medical humanities. This module will enhance your ability to assess ideas and evidence from a variety of sources and then choose, justify, or critique work done across key disciplines. It will also encourage you to be reflective and review your own existing competences as well as nurture your ability to work across disciplines.

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Teaching is delivered entirely online through lectures, workshops and scaffolded learning assignments – the latter format being where large-scale topics are broken down into smaller units which are delivered online with subject experts and discussed collaboratively with peers.

For some modules you will also form online study groups with other students to work on group projects. You will also be supported through a number of in-person meetings with your tutor.

Assessment comes in a variety of formats and is designed to challenge you. You will be expected to produce essays, annotated bibliography entries, a project proposal and a 3,000-word Student Devised Assessment (SDA) when you will deliver your study findings using creative and context-appropriate methods.

It also includes assessed group work. The module in research methods includes a presentation followed by written peer reviews evaluating your own and other project proposals.

Entry requirements

At least one of the following:

A 2:1 undergraduate degree
Active enrolment on an intercalated UG/PG medical degree programme
At least three years work in a professional environment with relevance to health and/or medicine (e.g. clinical, NGO, policy, care work, etc)

A 500-word personal statement which should include the following:

An outline of your interest in an interdisciplinary Postgraduate Certificate in Medical Humanities
What skills and knowledge you would bring to the course
What skills and knowledge you would hope to acquire

English language requirements

Fees and funding

The tuition fees for 2025/26 academic year have not yet been finalised, they will be displayed here once approved.

The tuition fees shown are for one complete academic year of study, are set according to the academic year of entry, and remain the same throughout the duration of the programme for that cohort (unless otherwise stated) .

Please also check costs for colleges and accommodation .

Scholarships and Bursaries

We are committed to supporting the best students irrespective of financial circumstances and are delighted to offer a range of funding opportunities.

Career opportunities

Faculty of arts, department information.

Find out more:

Apply for a postgraduate course (including PGCE International) via our online portal.

Applicant Portal (not PGCE unless International)
Admissions Policy

The best way to find out what Durham is really like is to come and see for yourself!

Join a Postgraduate Open Day

Date: 01/09/2023 - 31/08/2024
Time: 09:00 - 17:00

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MEDICAL HUMANITIES

Best Essay & Creative Work in Medical Humanities

The best essay and creative work in medical humanities competition.

Students, please consider submitting your essays and creative works for the Best Essay and Creative Work in Medical Humanities Competition!

Past winners of the Best Essay & Creative Work in Medical Humanities Competition >

Eligibility:

Deadline: Friday, April 19, 2024, at 11:59 p.m.
First place prize: $250; Second place prize: $100; Honorable Mention: $50 .
Essay must be written for an approved Medical Humanities course (see current and past courses ).
Essay must be written for an approved Medical Humanities course from summer 2023, fall 2023, or spring 2024.
Papers must be between 5-25 pages (minimum of 1,250 words and maximum of 6,250 words).
Creative works are eligible (and may be shorter than 5 pages) -- see note below**
Student does not have to be a declared minor in the MDHM program.
Winners will be announced at the start of May 2024 and recognized during a Medical Humanities commencement reception.

**For creative or digital projects, please include a 250-word statement for reviewers that addresses the following questions: How did this project incorporate research into its design and construction? What ideas does this project communicate, and how does it seek to communicate them?

Upload instructions:

Format: PDF
For digital projects (such as web sites, videos, etc.), please include a URL/link to the work with the 250-word statement to be submitted as a PDF.
Project title
Class project was produced for
Class's professor
Semester and year class was taken
Subsequent pages: The submission itself

Annual Essay Competition Appllication Button

Submission guidelines

Article processing charges.

Waivers and Discounts

Topic Collections

Supplements, copyright and authors’ rights, article transfer service, rapid responses, editorial policy, transitioning to a greener future, plan s compliance.

Peer review

Reporting patient and public involvement in research

Data sharing, peer review.

Any author names (including file path in document footer)
Author institution details
Author contact details
Acknowledgements
Competing interests (if declared)
Ethics approval statements that refer to your institution
Please ensure tracked changes are switched off if previously used; this file will be automatically converted to PDF once uploaded through the online submission system and will be made available to the reviewers
At what stage in the research process were patients/the public first involved in the research and how?
How were the research question(s) and outcome measures developed and informed by their priorities, experience, and preferences?
How were patients/the public involved in the design of this study?
How were they involved in the recruitment to and conduct of the study?
Were they asked to assess the burden of the intervention and time required to participate in the research?
How were (or will) they be involved in your plans to disseminate the study results to participants and relevant wider patient communities (e.g. by choosing what information/results to share, when, and in what format)?

Blog and Podcast

Waivers and discounts, original research, current controversy, review essay.

The journal editor, an editorial board member or a learned society may wish to organise a meeting, sponsorship may be sought and the proceedings published as a supplement.
The journal editor, editorial board member or learned society may wish to commission a supplement on a particular theme or topic. Again, sponsorship may be sought.
BMJ itself may have proposals for supplements where sponsorship may be necessary.
A sponsoring organisation, often a pharmaceutical company or a charitable foundation, that wishes to arrange a meeting, the proceedings of which will be published as a supplement.
Journal in which you would like the supplement published
Title of supplement and/or meeting on which it is based
Date of meeting on which it is based
Proposed table of contents with provisional article titles and proposed authors
An indication of whether authors have agreed to participate
Sponsor information including any relevant deadlines
An indication of the expected length of each paper Guest Editor proposals if appropriate

IMAGES

Medical Humanities
(PDF) Why medical humanities?
Welcome to Medical Humanities and Ethics Unit
Cultural Conversation: What are the Humanities to You?
(PDF) Medical humanities ... almost
Medical Humanities Q3KG07

VIDEO

How to select your thesis topic?? A quick guide for Pathology residents
Introduction to Medical Humanities and Literature (2020-07-02 at 22:45 GMT-7)
Plus Two Public Exam
Plus Two Public Exam Political Science
Med school "Why us?" essay strategy
Exploring the Role of Medical Humanities in Southampton’s Medical Education

COMMENTS

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Nina Stoyan-Rosenzweig serves as medical historian for the Health Science Center at the University of Florida and directs medical humanities programming in the College of Medicine. She is an advisor for the UF Gold Humanism Honor Society and works on a variety of programs and projects on topics ranging from eugenics to arts in traditional ...
Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities
This essay describes the origins, growth, and transformation of the medical humanities over the past six decades, drawing on the insights of ethicists, physicians, historians, patients, activists, writers, and literature scholars who participated in building the field. The essay traces how the original idea of "humanizing physicians" evolved and how crises from death and dying, to AIDS and ...
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Medical Humanities is a Plan S compliant Transformative Journal. Medical Humanities is led by Dr Brandy Schillace, the journal publishes scholarly and critical articles on a broad range of topics. These include history of medicine, cultures of medicine, disability studies, gender and the body, communities in crisis, bioethics, and public health.
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Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities
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Best Essay & Creative Work in Medical Humanities
First place prize: $250; Second place prize: $100; Honorable Mention: $50. Essay must be written for an approved Medical Humanities course (see current and past courses ). Essay must be written for an approved Medical Humanities course from summer 2023, fall 2023, or spring 2024. Papers must be between 5-25 pages (minimum of 1,250 words and ...
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Authors. Acceptance rate: 26%. Citescore: 2.6. Total content views: 204,412. Medical Humanities is a leading international journal that offers a platform not only for presenting, but also for shaping the conversation around medicine as practice and philosophy as it engages with humanities and arts, social sciences, health policy, medical ...

Patients Are Humans Too: The Emergence of Medical Humanities

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