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The Medical Humanities Today: Humane Health Care or Tool of Governance?

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Abstract

The medical humanities have been presented as a panacea for medical reductionism; a means for ‘humanizing’ medicine. However, there is a lack of consensus about the appropriate contributing disciplines and how curricula should be taught and assessed. This special issue critically examines the role of the medical humanities in medical education and their potential to serve, inadvertently or otherwise, as a tool of governance. The contributors, who include medical educators and medical practitioners, employ a range of perspectives for analysing the pertinent issues.

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Notes

  1. I Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis and the Expropriation of Health (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977).

  2. AW Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  3. General Medical Council, Tomorrow’s Doctors: Recommendations on Undergraduate Medical Education (London: GMC, 2003).

  4. A Bleakley, R Marshall and R Brömer, “Toward an Aesthetic Medicine: Developing a Core Medical Humanities Undergraduate Curriculum,” Journal of Medical Humanities 2006, vol 27, no 4: 197-213.

  5. J Gordon, “Medical humanities: to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always,” Medical Journal of Australia 2005, vol 182, no 1: 5-8.

  6. Ibid.

  7. AM Kjær, Governance (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).

  8. G Burchell, C Gordon, and P Miller, eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 2.

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Correspondence to Alan Petersen.

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Petersen, A., Bleakley, A., Brömer, R. et al. The Medical Humanities Today: Humane Health Care or Tool of Governance?. J Med Humanit 29, 1–4 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-007-9044-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-007-9044-y

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