De-medicalizing the Medical Humanities

Abstract

In this essay I argue that the integration of the humanities into “medical humanities” has implicitly medicalized the humanities. This medicalization of the humanities suppresses those dimensions of the humanities that can most significantly contribute to medicine. I present my argument by studying the critical and crucial gap between the humanities as they are presented and taught in the context of medical schools, often as a set of skills, sensitivities, and competencies, and the humanities as they are experienced and lived in the humanities—as an ideological-ethical calling, which saturates and infuses daily life with an ethicizing, politicizing, and ideological critique. It is this core essence of the humanities that is abrogated and annulled in medical humanities. After presenting my argument, I exemplify some of the ways in which my colleagues and I attempt to imbue medical students with the critical and ethicizing outlook and calling of the humanities.

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Dr. Einat Avrahami for her many constructive and important suggestions.

Notes

1. While I focus here on “medical” humanities, my general argument also pertains to “veterinary medical” humanities (a field that is clearly underdeveloped) and to the integration of the humanities in general into the natural science curriculum.

2. I believe that the general thrust of my argument stands even though I am fully aware that both medical humanities programs and the humanities comprise and represent a variety of different approaches and disciplines.

3. As a medical student I read a variety of literatures in the humanities and the social sciences. I also graduated from one of the first and pioneering bio-psycho-social programs—at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. I have learned since, however, that despite the integration of various courses from the humanities/social sciences into our curriculum, the biopsychosocial model does not come close to conveying what the humanities are all about.

4. I use “Vocation” in terms of a calling. See Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, eds., Max Weber's ‘Science as a Vocation’ (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

5. For example, teaching statistics in conjunction with the history of the emergence of biometrics and its direct associations with eugenics; teaching radiation therapy alongside the literature on the exchange between military and medical interests in radioactivity in the post-WWII period; or teaching public health in conjunction with Nazi medical research on, and interest in, hygiene.

6. Bert Hansen, “American Physicians’ ‘Discovery’ of Homosexuality, 1880–1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society,” in Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 104–33.

7. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (London: W. W. Norton, 1981), 73–107; and Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth Century America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

8. Helen E. Longino, “Can There Be a Feminist Science?” in Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, ed. Mary Wyer et al. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 216–22.

9. This mini-seminar was co-taught with a number of clinicians. I thank my colleagues, Drs. Esther-Lee Marcus, Yoram Maaravi, Allon Moses, and Ayelet Shauer.

10. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Myra J. Hird, Sex, Gender, and Science (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Nelly Oudshoorn, “On Measuring Sex Hormones: The Role of Biological Assays in Sexualizing Chemical Substances,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (1990): 243–61. But see recent criticisms of this thesis in Isis 94 (2003): 274–313. On five sexes, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences (March/April 1993): 20–24.

11. On Caster Semenya, see Hastings Center Report For the final conclusion of this confusion, so far, see Christopher Clarey, “As Semenya Returns, So Do Questions,” The New York Times, 22 August 2010, online edition, accessed 23 August 2010.

Alice Dreger, “Sex Typing for Sport,”

40.2 (2010): 22–24.

12. Londa Schiebinger, ed., Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Angela H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Feminisms in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2001).

13. George Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1966).

14. Lynn Payer, Medicine & Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).

15. Despite recent preliminary claims in respect to the detection of a retrovirus that is associated with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. See Vincent C. Lombardi et al., “Detection of an Infectious Retrovirus, XMRV, in Blood Cells of Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,” Science 326 (23 October 2009): 585–89.

16. This lecture takes off from Roy Porter's essay on the physical examination. See Roy Porter, “The Rise of Physical Examination,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 179–97.

17. Alison Winter, “A Calculus of Suffering: Ada Lovelace and the Bodily Constraints on Women's Knowledge in Early Victorian England,” in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 202–39.