Medical Humanities Pedagogy: Beyond Ethics, Towards Empathy

Most medical humanities curriculums focus on students going into healthcare fields, with the intent of training more empathic practitioners and helping students learn about systemic issues like healthcare disparities and bias in medical research. Although these goals are vital, I argue that medical humanities curriculums benefit all students, regardless of majors and career goals. In this piece, I explore how a medical humanities focus in undergraduate humanities classes can increase medical literacy and help students become better advocates for themselves in healthcare settings. Furthermore, I examine how medical humanities topics, beyond ethics, can be a powerful pedagogical tool. Several years ago, I had the pleasure of reviewing Mita Banerjee's 2018 Medical Humanities in American Studies: Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography. In the book, she asks us to reconsider the relationship between medicine and the humanities, writing that we must think about “not only what the humanities can do for medicine but also what medicine can do for the humanities” (Banerjee 33). I’ve been thinking about that line ever since.