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A research colloquium, sponsored jointly by the University of Wales and the Nuffield Trust, took place at Gregynog Hall, Powys, during early May 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to provide the opportunity for an intensive exploration of how the medical humanities could, as a recently emerging field of inquiry, best be developed into a worthwhile area of university-based teaching and research. The invited participants, primarily from United Kingdom universities but with a significant delegation of academics from Finland as well as individual thinkers from outside the university system, met to consider practical, methodological and theoretical or philosophical questions about the nature, scope and prospects of medical humanities as an academic undertaking.
This was the second meeting of this kind, the first having led directly to the publication of the first post-introductory volume of papers from the current medical humanities movement1 and, indirectly, to the founding of this journal.
In this year's meeting, most research contributions concerned educational matters including whether there could be a “core curriculum” for medical humanities and whether medical humanities should be considered as belonging to the core of medical education.
Other questions included the nature of the relationship between humanities, healthy communities and the social goods supporting wellbeing; the problem of detached bureaucratic regulation of practice, and how it and its fixation with numerical measurement may best be understood and dealt with, and the nature and explanatory possibilities of the relationship between the metaphors used by patients and practitioners in the clinical consultation.
Abstracts of these presentations follow.
The Medical Humanities as part of the ‘core’ curriculum
Jane Macnaughton
The General Medical Council's (GMC) 1993 guidance document, Tomorrow's Doctors, set out the principle that the undergraduate medical curriculum should include material that was either of “core” relevance to the creation of a generic doctor, or that would be of …
Footnotes
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Martyn Evans is Senior Lecturer, School of Health Sciences, University of Wales Swansea. David Greaves is Senior Lecturer, School of Health Sciences, University of Wales Swansea. Jane Macnaughton is Director, Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine, University of Durham. Pekka Louhiala is Lecturer in the Department of Public Health, University of Helsinki, Finland. Anne Borsay is Lecturer, Department of History, University of Wales, Lampeter. Bernard Moxham is Professor of Anatomy, Cardiff School of Biosciences, University of Wales Cardiff. Victoria Morgan is a PhD student at the Open University. Ray Pahl is Professor of Sociology, University of Essex. James Willis is a General Practitioner in Alton, Hampshire, England. Raimo Puustinen is a General Practitioner in Outokumpo, Karelia, Finland. Mikael Leiman is Adjunct Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Joensuu, Finland. Anna-Maria Viljanen is Senior Fellow, Academcy of Finland, Department of Anthropology, University of Helsinki, Finland. Stephen Pattison is Professor of Theology, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Wales Cardiff. Kieran Sweeney is Lecturer in General Practice and Health Services Research, Research and Development Support Unit and Department of General Practice, University of Exeter.