Humanities and Medicine
The world of medicine is increasingly recognizing the importance of explicit attention to the humanities. After all, if medicine is devoted to making sense of what it means to be sick, then it is the job of the physician to tease out the nuanced spaces between wellness and disease. The study of the humanities is distinctively suited to this challenging task.
What do we mean when we refer to the humanities, especially with regard to the practice of medicine? Put simply, medical humanities focus on what it means, literally, to be human. To this end, physicians benefit from skilled attention to literature, poetry, philosophy, history, ethics, art, artistic performance, and even the social sciences.
As the famous physician Sir William Osler said to his students more than a hundred years ago:
鈥淭o know the patient that has the disease is more important than to know the disease that the patient has.鈥