Introduction: Bridging the Divides

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Notes

1. Jakob Ousager and Helle Johannessen, “Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education: Literature Review,” Academic Medicine 85.6 (2010): 988–98. In the same issue of Academic Medicine, Rita Charon usefully qualifies the data covered by this review by noting that “many salient humanities publications are … excluded” (“Calculating the Contributions of Humanities to Medical Practice—Motives, Methods, and Metrics,” 935).

2. It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive literature review. However, the New York University School of Medicine provides an impressive, annotated resource archive for medical humanities’ teachers and scholars (http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/, accessed 6 February 2011); for a recent example challenging medical socialization through humanities intervention, see Susan Rosenthal et al., “Humanism at Heart: Preserving Empathy in Third-Year Medical Students,” Academic Medicine 86.3 (2011): 1–9 (in the electronic format); examples of testing the received assumptions and goals of medical culture are cited in the books reviewed in this special issue.

3. http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/; It is important to note that the web site also affirms the specific contribution of the social sciences to medicine, which is not mentioned here for lack of space.

4. Delese Wear, “The Medical Humanities: Toward a Renewed Praxis,” Journal of Medical Humanities 30 (2009): 209–20; Martyn H. Evans, “Affirming the Existential within Medicine: Medical Humanities, Governance, and Imaginative Understanding,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008): 57.

5. For a sound bibliography on medical professionalism that reflects the influence of humanistic methods of inquiry on aspects of physicians’ professional development and the professionalism curricula, see John Spandorfer et al., Professionalism in Medicine: A Case-Based Guide for Medical Students (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 18–21.

6. Wear, “The Medical Humanities: Toward a Renewed Praxis,” 210–11.

7. Ousager and Johannessen, “Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education: Literature Review”; Charon, “Calculating the Contributions of Humanities to Medical Practice—Motives, Methods, and Metrics,” 935–37.

8. Catherine Belling, “Sharper Instruments: On Defending the Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education,” Academic Medicine 85.6 (2010): 938–40; Johanna Shapiro, “Walking a Mile in Their Patients’ Shoes: Empathy and Othering in Medical Students’ Education,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 3.10 (2008), doi: 10.1 186/1747-5341-3-10.

9. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Medicine and Humanities: Emerging Definitions,” Euthanasia Policy in The Netherlands, Medicine and Humanities Emerging Definitions, ed. Bert Keizer (Berkeley, CA: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009), 28–38, http://townsendcenter.berkely.edu); quoted in Christina M. Gillis, “Medicine and Humanities: Voicing Connections,” Journal of Medical Humanities 29 (2008): 9–10.

10. Gillis, “Medicine and Humanities: Voicing Connections,” 5.

11. Belling, “Sharper Instruments: On Defending the Humanities in Undergraduate Medical Education,” 939.

12. Gillis, “Medicine and Humanities: Voicing Connections,” 11–12. Rita Charon's many publications point at the same direction. See especially her seminal book Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), reviewed in this issue.

13. Martyn Evans, “Reflections on the Humanities in Medical Education,” Medical Education 36.6 (2002): 508–13.

14. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 63.

15. Charles M. Anderson, “Editor's Column: Writing and Reading,” Literature and Medicine 19.1 (2000): x.

16. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, “In Two Voices, or: Whose Life/Death/Story Is It, Anyway?” in A Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. James Felan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 407.

17. Ilana Hammerman and Jurgen Nieraad, Under the Sign of Cancer: A Journey of No Return (in Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 2001), 149; my translation.

18. Margaret Urban Walker, “Morality in Practice: A Response to Claudia Card and Lorraine Code,” Hypatia 17.1 (2002): 178.

19. See, for example, Shlomi Segall, Health, Luck, and Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

20. Walker, “Morality in Practice: A Response to Claudia Card and Lorraine Code,” 178.