Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Striving to do Good Things: Teaching Humanities in Canadian Medical Schools

  • Published:
Journal of Medical Humanities Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We provide the results of a systematic key-informant review of medical humanities curricula at fourteen of Canada’s seventeen medical schools. This survey was the first of its kind. We found a wide diversity of views among medical educators as to what constitutes the medical humanities, and a lack of consensus on how best to train medical students in the field. In fact, it is not clear that consensus has been attempted – or is even desirable – given that Canadian medical humanities programs are largely shaped by individual educators’ interests, experience and passions. This anarchic approach to teaching the medical humanities contrasts sharply with teaching in the clinical sciences where national accreditation processes attempt to ensure that doctors graduating from different schools have roughly the same knowledge (or at least have passed the same exams). We argue that medical humanities are marginalized in Canadian curricula because they are considered to be at odds philosophically with the current dominant culture of evidence-based medicine (EBM). In such a culture where adhering to a consensual standard is a measure of worth, the medical humanities – which defy easy metrical appraisal – are vulnerable. We close with a plea for medical education to become more comfortable in the borderlands between EBM and humanities approaches.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. J Winterson, Written on the Body (New York: Vintage, 1992).

  2. R Ahlzen and C-M Stolt, “The Humanistic Medicine Program at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden,” Academic Medicine 78 (10): 1039-1042.

  3. R Charon, JT Banks, JE Connolly, AH Hawkins, et al., “Literature and Medicine: Contributions to Clinical Practice,” Annals of Internal Medicine 122 (8): 599-606.

  4. KM Hunter, Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

  5. J Coulehan and PC Williams, “Vanquishing Virtue: The Impact of Medical Education,” Academic Medicine 76 (6): 598-605.

  6. FW Hafferty, “Beyond Curriculum Reform: Confronting Medicine's Hidden Curriculum,” Academic Medicine 73 (4): 403-407. See also H Lempe and C Seale, “The Hidden Curriculum in Undergraduate Medical Education: Qualitative Study of Medical Students' Perceptions of Teaching,” British Medical Journal 329 (2004): 770-773.

  7. HA Squier, “Teaching Humanities in the Undergraduate Medical Curriculum,” in Narrative-Based Medicine, eds. T Greenhalgh and B Hurwitz (London: BMJ Books, 1998).

  8. American Association of Medical Schools, “Learning Objectives for Medical Student Education: Guidelines for Medical Schools,” Report of the American Association of Medical School Objectives Project (1998).

  9. D Holmes, SJ Murray, A Perron, and G Rail, “Deconstructing the Evidence-Based Discourse in Health Sciences: Truth, Power and Fascism,” International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare 4, (3): 180-186.

  10. B Magwood, O Casiro, and B Hennan, “The Medical Humanities Program at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada,” Academic Medicine 78 (10): 1015-1019.

  11. J Murray, “Development of a Medical Humanities Program at Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1992-2003,” Academic Medicine 78 (10): 1020-1024.

  12. D Pullman, C Bethune, and P Duke, “Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty of Medicine, The Medical Humanities in the Clinical Skills Course,” Academic Medicine 78 (10): 1068-1069.

  13. BL Berg, Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995), pp. 174-199.

  14. S Pattison, “Medical Humanities: A Vision and Some Cautionary Notes,” Journal of Medical Ethics: Medical Humanities 29 (2003): 33-36.

  15. See Hafferty, “Beyond Curriculum Reform.”

  16. JTH Connor, “The Victorian Revolution in Surgery,” Science 304(2004): 54-55.

  17. P Haidet, PA Kelly and C Chou, “Characterizing the Patient-Centeredness of Hidden Curricula in Medical Schools: Development and Validation of a New Measure,” Academic Medicine 80 (1): 44-49.

  18. See Hafferty, “Beyond Curriculum Reform.”

  19. J Duffin, “On Humanities in Medical Education,” Dermanities 4 (1): a2.

  20. Holmes et al., “Deconstructing the Evidence-Based Discourse.”

  21. SJ Gould, The Hedgehog, the God, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003).

  22. Hafferty, “Beyond Curriculum Reform.”

  23. JF Shapiro and L Rucker, “Can Poetry Make Better Doctors? Teaching the Humanities and Arts to Medical Students and Residents at the University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine,” Academic Medicine 78 (10): 953-957.

  24. Charon et al., “Literature and Medicine.”

  25. D Kirklin, “The Centre for Medical Humanities, Royal Free and University College Medical School, London, England,” Academic Medicine 78 (10): 1048-1053.

  26. Coulehan and Williams, “Vanquishing Virtue.”

  27. S Pattison, “Medical Humanities: A Vision and Some Cautionary Notes.”

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr. Maria Matthews, Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, Dr. Marcel D’Eon, Dr. William Whitelaw, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to a summer undergraduate student research grant to MGK from Memorial University of Newfoundland Faculty of Medicine School of Graduate Studies and Research.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to M. G. Kidd.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Kidd, M.G., Connor, J.T.H. Striving to do Good Things: Teaching Humanities in Canadian Medical Schools. J Med Humanit 29, 45–54 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-007-9049-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-007-9049-6

Keywords

Navigation