What are the Medical Humanities?
The medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field combining the humanities, social sciences, and arts and applying them to medical education and practice. It is a field that stresses the human aspect of medicine, to see patients for the people that they are.
Why do the Medical Humanities matter?
Challenges and flaws exist in every field, and medicine is no exception. Many often cite the high rates of burnout among today’s physicians, based on a multitude of factors such as the mountains of debt or the amount of administrative work physicians face. Within the literature of physician burnout, it is well-known that “burned-out” physicians lose some of the compassion and empathy that drove them to medicine in the first place.
The medical humanities aims to tackle issues such as physician burnout through its emphasis on the human aspect of medicine. This field has grown tremendously since its inception, and today you can find medical humanities programs and electives in a number of medical school curricula (including our UCI School of Medicine). By no means does this field aim to completely solve all the issues that medicine and medical education offers, but it does hope to deter them.
Helpful Resources
UCI Center for Medical Humanities
Minoring in Medical Humanities at UC Irvine