Post on the Place of the Medical Humanities in Medical Education

Johanna Shapiro has a wonderful post up at Literature, Arts & Medicine Blog about the place of the medical humanities in medical education:

The institution of medicine is deeply rooted in certain mechanistic, linear, positivist, objectivist, and reductive assumptions that are expressed every day in the ways physicians behave and the system as an entirety works; and which make it difficult to see the humanities as anything other than, at best, a nice but not essential, part of medical education; and at worst, pretty much a waste of time. Even if institutionalized medical education “makes room” for the humanities, it will do so on its own terms. This is not necessarily bad, but it is also not necessarily sufficient.

As they say, go read the whole thing.