How Health Humanities Will Save the Life of the Humanities

Abstract

In the last decade, the humanities have been shrinking in number of students, percent of faculty, and in number of degrees awarded. Humanities students also earn lower salaries than their STEM-prepared peers. At the same time, the health humanities have been in ascendance over the last fifteen years. The number of majors, minors and certificates has increased 266% in that time frame, attracting large numbers of students and preparing future patients, lay caregivers, and health care providers to interact with a complicated and dehumanized medical system. In 1982, British philosopher and educator Stephen Toulmin declared that medicine saved philosophy from irrelevance and possibly extinction. I propose that the health humanities can serve a similar function to stave off the decline of the broader humanities. The health humanities can (1) model an applied approach for the broader humanities to attract student interest; (2) develop students' capacity for critical reading, writing and reflection about health and medicine in society, practice, and their own lives and (3) inoculate all students against the influence of medicine, whether through preparing pre-health students to navigate the hidden medical curriculum or preparing future patients to navigate the health care system.

Constructing a critical thinking evaluation framework for college students majoring in the humanities

“…They also need to learn and understand the content of texts and evaluate the views of others in order to expand the breadth of their thinking (Barrett, 2005). Moreover, they need the ability to analyze issues dialectically and rationally, and to continually reflect on themselves and offer constructive comments (Klugman, 2018;Dumitru, 2019). Collegiate CT skills are taught via independent courses or embedded modules (Zhang et al, 2022).…”

Healthcare Management and the Humanities: An Invitation to Dialogue

“…Medical schools subliminally de-emphasize patient interaction, communication, and reflective reason. Patients’ decisions are often influenced by advertising and physician recommendations…studying the humanities as baccalaureate students may provide a vaccination against these biases” [ 31 ] (p. 426). While arguably a provocative statement, Krugman’s framing of the subliminal influence of medical schools calls into question the influence of healthcare management programs and, specifically, whether a similar vaccination effect might manifest as a result of a “hidden curriculum” [ 32 ] of business education, which, as critical healthcare management scholars point out [ 33 ], implicitly teaches students how to wield power through exclusionary “expert” knowledge, often in direct proportion to a declining interest in social and political issues.…”

Developing Humanistic Competencies Within the Competency-Based Curriculum

“…When we began our experimentations with the humanities, we envisaged our medical humanities practice as being inclusive of cultural diversity, of disability, of social justice, and of everything -medical or artistic or humanities-basedthat could benefit the provider-patient-caregiver circle in the long run [4]. For that reason, we find the distinction to be a matter of semantics and we embrace the term Health Humanities in deference to all "healthcare providers, patients and family caregivers" [8]. We, herein, broaden the theoretical framework of Peterkin [13] and apply it to the ABCDE attributes [4]these, then, directly translate into five competencies that we believe all health professions learners should seek to acquire.…”