The orphan child: humanities in modern medical education
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(2019) 14:1
COMMENTARY
Open Access
The orphan child: humanities in modern medical education Mary E. Kollmer Horton
Abstract Use of humanities content in American medical education has been debated for well over 60 years. While many respected scholars and medical educators have purported the value of humanities content in medical training, its inclusion remains unstandardized, and the undergraduate medical curriculum continues to be focused on scientific and technical content. Cited barriers to the integration of humanities include time and space in an already overburdened curriculum, and a lack of consensus on the exact content, pedagogy and instruction. Edmund Pellegrino, physician and scholar of the latter twentieth century, spent much of his professional life promoting the value and importance of the humanities in medical education, seeking the best way to incorporate and teach this content in clinically relevant ways. His efforts included the founding of multiple enterprises starting in the 1960s and 1970s to promote human values in medical education, including the Society for Health and Human Values and its Institute on Human Values in Medicine. Regardless of his efforts and those of many others into the current century, the medical humanities remains a curricular orphan, unable to find a lasting home in medical education and training.
History of the debate Debate around the inclusion of humanities in modern American medical education has been ongoing for well over 60 years. While there is much literature over the decades to support the value of humanities content in medical training, such as medical history, bioethics, narrative medicine, medical social sciences, and the arts, its standard inclusion in medical education remains elusive. Regardless of its purported value to medicine, medical education remains heavily focused on scientific and technical content with little room for the study of disciplines outside of medical science and technology [1–7].1 Time and space in an already overburdened curriculum are obvious barriers to inclusion, but questions regarding the type of humanities content, who to teach it, and the most effective methods of teaching remain contentious and unresolved. Edmund Pellegrino, physician and scholar of the latter twentieth century, spent much of his professional life promoting the value and importance of the humanities in medical education, seeking the best
way to incorporate and teach humanities content in clinically relevant ways. Arguments for the inclusion of the humanities in undergraduate medical education center around the contention that medicine and its practice is both a technical, scientific profession, as well as a humanistic, moral one [2, 5].2 A profession that must understand not only the scientific basis of disease, and the technology that is available to diagnose and treat disease, but also recognize and appreciate the person in which the disease exists. The argument for incorporating the humanities in medical education is really two fold. First, exposure an
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