Brief observationMedical Humanities Coursework Is Associated with Greater Measured Empathy in Medical Students
Section snippets
Groups Compared
Our central research question was whether empathy scores would be preserved among students who took humanities coursework or their empathy scores would decrease, as appears typical of US medical students. Therefore, we compared a group of students who took humanities coursework with peer students in the same year and the same medical school program who did not take any medical humanities coursework.
Measure Compared
We selected the JSE-S because of its wide use and prior validation, having been used in 83
Results
Studying medical humanities correlated with increased JSE-S outcomes at the end of the school year. Of 88 students invited to participate, 68 completed the JSE-S instrument at both the beginning and the end of the year. Of these 68, 25 enrolled in medical humanities coursework and 43 did not. Twenty eligible participants did not complete the JSE-S and were excluded from the analysis. Of 43 students who did not participate in medical humanities coursework, 12 (28%) demonstrated an increase in
Discussion
To our knowledge, these are the first data associating medical humanities coursework with favorable empathy outcomes among students. Medical humanities studies may ameliorate the “hardening of the heart” known to occur during medical school education. In our study, medical humanities coursework correlated with favorable scores of clinical empathy.
We suggest 2 major mechanisms to explain our finding of favorable empathy score outcomes among humanities students. First, humanities coursework may
Conclusions
Despite these limitations, our overall positive results suggest that medical humanities coursework may improve empathy as an educational outcome. Future research should evaluate whether humanities coursework that is required, instead of elective, has a similar correlation with favorable empathy scores. Second, the relationship between studying humanities and higher empathy scores should be examined in the later clinical phase of medical school. Ongoing study will improve medical curricula to
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Funding: None.
Conflict of Interest: None.
Authorship: All authors had access to the data and played a role in writing this manuscript.