How medical humanities and health humanities should get along: a keyword co-occurrence analysis of the literature

Medical humanities have demonstrated their significance in medical education and practice, significantly enriching the understanding of health care professions through profound explorations of life, illness, and the doctor–patient relationship. In response to shifting disease patterns and increasingly diverse health challenges, health humanities have emerged, expanding the boundaries of traditional medical humanities through a broader and more inclusive perspective. Certain scholars maintain that health humanities constitutes a superior and more inclusive conceptual framework than medical humanities. This contention prompts critical consideration of how these fields might navigate their evolving relationship within interdisciplinary scholarship. Notably, extant literature addressing both domains remains predominantly theoretical. In response, this study employs bibliometric keyword co-occurrence analysis—supplemented by visualisation tools—to systematically map medical and health humanities research retrieved from the Web of Science. Through this analysis, it systematically reveals their distinctions and interconnections within the academic landscape, proposing a novel framework to model their dynamic interaction. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identifies distinct research clusters: medical humanities (4 themes), health humanities (5 themes), and their intersection (6 themes). Subsequent comparison reveals three key distinctions within medical education practice:divergent educational audiences, contrasting curricular frameworks, and differentiated practical content; Humanitarian interventions: medical humanities and health humanities operate on distinct timescales; Public health engagement: medical humanities demonstrates insufficient attention to public and global health; Mental health applications: medical humanities focuses on distress alleviation, health humanities emphasises well-being promotion; Cost-effectiveness: health humanities represents the most economical approach for population health enhancement; Social justice imperative: health humanities application to health disparities is strategically indicated. While health humanities expand the scope of medical humanities, the former’s broad vision cannot encompass medical humanities’ profound understanding of life and disease. Consequently, their relationship is characterised by coexistence rather than substitution—enabling these complementary disciplines to collectively enhance human well-being.