Reconceptualizing the Role of Literature and the Arts in Medical Education through Vulnerability and Care

This paper reconsiders the conceptual foundations of vulnerability and care in medical education by repositioning literature and the arts within a hermeneutic framework. In dominant models, vulnerability has often been construed as a condition of deficiency requiring correction, whereas literature and the arts have been justified instrumentally as tools for cultivating empathy. This paper challenges both assumptions. Drawing on hermeneutics and recent critiques of empathy-centered medical humanities, this paper argues that vulnerability is not a stable attribute but an event-like phenomenon that emerges situationally within clinical encounters. Vulnerability first manifests through sensory and affective registers before being organized into medical knowledge or ethical judgment. This affective attunement constitutes an irreducible dimension of clinical perception that biomedical frameworks cannot fully accommodate. Rather than a problem to be resolved, vulnerability functions as an interpretive excess that solicits response. Care is accordingly reconceptualized not as the expression of correct emotional dispositions or standardized procedures, but as an interpretive practice—a form of phronesis— in which the meaning of vulnerability is apprehended within its singular context. Empathy may initiate moral responsiveness, but it cannot substitute for the interpretive process that affective attunement demands. These arguments are developed through an analysis of the parallel chart, understood as a site where students encounter patients’ vulnerability yet struggle to translate experience into clinical understanding. The paper concludes by examining the educator’s role in sustaining this interpretive space and argues that medical humanities education is constitutive of, rather than ancillary to, clinical judgment and professional formation.