Humanities
by
The word humanities is at the core of the medical and health humanities. Still, anyone who has walked into a room of health-care practitioners, students, and humanities professors ready to do medical humanities or health humanities work knows all are eager to improve the practices of health care, but individuals differ—sometimes radically—in their understanding of what that work is. Today’s debates over defining the health humanities frequently focus on the differences between health and medicine (Crawford et al. 2010; T. Jones et al. 2017), but some of the most challenging differences emerge from divergent understandings of the word humanities. These differences are not merely inside baseball: they determine what kinds of interventions into the practices of health care are possible. In medical contexts especially, the term humanities names something missing from health care today: a way to cultivate humaneness. These humanities offer a sorely needed antidote to the callous dollars-and-cents logic and baroque bureaucracies of today’s Western health-care systems. As recently as 2014, the American Academy of Medical Colleges identified training in feeling and therapy for physicians, with an emphasis on empathy, as the core of humanities work in medical schools (Krisberg 2014). This understanding of the humanities is best...
This essay may be found on page 111 of the printed volume.