The Journal of medical humanities
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The medical humanities have been presented as a panacea for medical reductionism; a means for 'humanizing' medicine. However, there is a lack of consensus about the appropriate contributing disciplines and how curricula should be taught and assessed. This special issue critically examines the role of the medical humanities in medical education and their potential to serve, inadvertently or otherwise, as a tool of governance. The contributors, who include medical educators and medical practitioners, employ a range of perspectives for analysing the pertinent issues.
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Accepting as a given that the humanities disciplines are not product or "results" driven, this paper argues that the core of an interdisciplinary field of medicine and humanities, or medical humanities, is an interpretive enterprise that is not readily open to quantitative assessment. A more humanistically oriented medical practice can derive, however, from the process that produces new insights and works toward the development of a new, mutually shared, and humanizing language.
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This paper first distinguishes governance (collective, autonomous self-regulatory processes) from government (externally-imposed mandatory regulation); it proposes that the second of these is essentially incompatible with a conception of the medical humanities that involves imagination and vision on the part of medical practitioners. It next develops that conception of the medical humanities, as having three distinguishable aspects (all of them distinct from the separate phenomena popularly known as "arts-in-health"): first, an intellectual enquiry into the nature of clinical medicine; second, an important dimension of medical education; third, a resource for moral and aesthetic influences upon clinical practice, supporting "humane health care" as the moral inspirations behind organised medicine. ⋯ However, it can neither be achieved mechanistically nor well-measured through proxies such as patient satisfaction. Above all, it should not be allowed to supply, through inappropriate qualitative "targets," new forms of management tyranny.
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Biography Historical Article
The Doctor by Luke Fildes: an icon in context.
This paper discusses one of the most famous paintings on medical themes: The Doctor by Sir Luke Fildes (Fig. 1), which exemplifies how an ideal type of doctoring is construed from reality and from the views and expectations of both the public and doctors themselves. A close reading of The Doctor elucidates three fundamental conflicts in medicine: the first is between statistical efficiency in accordance with scales of morbidity and mortality and the personal devotion that every sick child or suffering individual wants to receive; the second is between the doctor-dominated market and the patient-dominated market; and the third is between influential and rich doctors ("consultants") and practitioners of family medicine (GPs).