TY - JOUR T1 - Medical humanities as expressive of Western culture JF - Medical Humanities JO - J Med Humanit SP - 79 LP - 84 DO - 10.1136/medhum-2011-010120 VL - 37 IS - 2 AU - Claire Hooker AU - Estelle Noonan Y1 - 2011/12/01 UR - http://mh.bmj.com/content/37/2/79.abstract N2 - In this paper we articulate a growing awareness within the field of the ways in which medical humanities could be deemed expressive of Western cultural values. The authors suggest that medical humanities is culturally limited by a pedagogical and scholarly emphasis on Western cultural artefacts, as well as a tendency to enact an uncritical reliance upon foundational concepts (such as ‘patient’ and ‘experience’) within Western medicine. Both these tendencies within the field, we suggest, are underpinned by a humanistic emphasis on appreciative or receptive encounters with ‘difference’ among patients that may unwittingly contribute to the marginalisation of some patients and healthcare workers. While cultural difference should be acknowledged as a central preoccupation of medical humanities, we argue that the discipline must continue to expand its scholarly and critical engagements with processes of Othering in biomedicine. We suggest that such improvements are necessary in order to reflect the cultural diversification of medical humanities students, and the geographical expansion of the discipline within non-Western and/or non-Anglophone locations. ER -