The great medical questions—and beyond: A medical-humanities curriculum

Behind every profound question is another profound question. Niels Bohr What are the humanities? And why should humanities be included in a medical curriculum? The humanities are systems of thought where truth is studied through reasoning, interpretations and judgments. The humanities reason that we live in a webbed essence that includes culture, societies, beliefs and practices. They introduce questions of principles and values, and they hold that there are no simple answers to the great questions of life. Premised on uncertainties, paradoxes, contradictions and divergent explanations, they acknowledge the nature of conflicting values and conflicting versions of truth. Extending this definition into medical humanities, for example, a researcher cannot fully grasp the complexities of underlying diseases without an awareness of their devastating effects on societies. Embracing this definition of humanities, the study of medical humanities strengthens the medical profession at its most fundamental, spiritual core and, in partnership with science, it enhances the moral and ethical values upon which medicine builds its philosophy. This paper will argue that, in a medical humanities curriculum, deep readings of literary texts provide essential practice in critical analysis necessary for medical training. It advances the claim that a humanities methodology invites less obvious, but highly sophisticated qualitative perspectives. A close reading of a text can discover a narrative’s embedded significance and intensify the reader’s ability to form multi-faceted concepts. Teaching medical humanities: Because of military confrontations from the recent past in Iraq and