Conceptions of medical humanities

In the first issue of Medical Humanities we raised the question of the relationship between medical ethics (or bioethics) and medical humanities, and this question is presently receiving considerable attention. Last September it occupied two important meetings, one being a workshop at the International Association of Bioethics World Congress in London, and the other being a joint seminar involving Oxford University and the Hastings Center, the premier US bioethics institution. In North America as a whole, ethics and humanities have already begun converging, with scholarly associations joining forces and some university departments combining ethics and humanities in their titles.

Here it is significant that this journal has been launched as a special edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics, giving the impression perhaps that humanities is either a subsidiary of, or an accessory to, ethics. However, this simply reflects the sequence in which the …