This book examines the impetus to incorporate the arts into the science of medicine.

This textbook uses concepts and methods of the humanities to enhance understanding of medicine and health care.

Bringing together two parallel and occasionally intersecting disciplines - the environmental and medical humanities - this field-defining handbook reveals our ecological predicament to be a simultaneous threat to human health. The book: · Represents the first collection to bring the environmental humanities and medical humanities into conversation in a systematic way · Features contributions from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives including literary studies, environmental ethics and philosophy, cultural history and sociology · Adopts a truly global approach, examining contexts including, but not limited to, North America, the UK, Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Turkey and East Asia · Touches on issues and approaches such as narrative medicine, ecoprecarity, toxicity, mental health, and contaminated environments. Showcasing and surveying a rich spectrum of issues and methodologies, this book looks not only at where research currently is at the intersection of these two important fields, but also at where it is going.

This fourth volume in the Companion to Medical Humanities series contemplates the challenge of the prognosis, of looking ahead, wondering what will happen, and attempting to make sense of life and death.

Medical Ethics and Humanities is a survey of medical ethics and humanities geared toward physician assistants, analyzing important ethics, humanities, and law topics. The book explains the various approaches to ethical analysis and illustrates their application through the use of cases.

This volume illustrates ongoing discussions in and about the medical humanities with studies on different approaches to the relationship between medical science and practice and the humanities, including reflections based on fiction, art, history, socio-economic and political concerns, architecture and natural landscapes. The book explores the ways in which healthcare and medical practice can be positively influenced by removing the focus from the technical knowledge of the medical practitioner. It offers innovative perspectives on spaces for healing, traces attitudes and beliefs in relation to illnesses and their treatment throughout history (including intimations of the future), and interrogates cultural attitudes to illness, doctoring and patients through the lens of fiction. Based on the premise that more interdisciplinary work between medical and non-medical professionals is needed, the chapters contained in this volume contribute to an ongoing dialogue between medicine and the humanities that continues to enrich both disciplines.

Medical Humanities may be broadly conceptualized as a discipline wherein medicine and its specialties intersect with those of the humanities and social sciences. As such it is a hybrid area of study where the impact of disease and healing science on culture is assessed and expressed in the particular language of the disciplines concerned with the human experience. However, as much as at first sight this definition appears to be clear, it does not reflect how the interaction of medicine with the humanities has evolved to become a separate field of study. In this publication we have explored, through the analysis of a group of selected multidisciplinary essays, the dynamics of this process. The essays predominantly address the interaction of literature, philosophy, art, art history, ethics, and education with medicine and its specialties from the classical period to the present. Particular attention has been given to the Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment periods. To avoid a rigid compartmentalization of the book based on individual fields of study we opted for a fluid division into multidisciplinary sections, reflective of the complex interactions of the included works with medicine.

Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities is the first book to reflect on the power of film in representing medical and health discourse in China in both the past and the present, as well as in shaping its future. Drawing on both feature and documentary films from mainland China, the chapters each engage with the field of medicine through the visual arts. They cover themes such as the history of doctors and their concepts of disease and therapies, understanding the patient experience of illness and death, and establishing empathy and compassion in medical practice, as well as the HIV/AIDs epidemic during the 1980s and 90s and changing attitudes towards disability. Inherently interdisciplinary in nature, the contributors therefore provide different perspectives from the fields of history, psychiatry, film studies, anthropology, linguistics, public health and occupational therapy, as they relate to China and people who identify as Chinese. Their combined approaches are united by a passion for improving the cross-cultural understanding of the body and ultimately healthcare itself. A key resource for educators in the Medical Humanities, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese Studies and Film Studies as well as global health, medical anthropology and medical history.

Most medical schools in the US, Canada and UK now incorporate some form of arts and humanities-based teaching into their curricula. What happens in residency is another story. Most postgraduate programs do not continue the thread of such teaching although many residents would like to deepen their understanding of the medical humanities before they move into practice. The humanities emphasize "the human side of medicine", and can provide a counterpoint to the reductionism of evidence-based medicine and technological hubris for young doctors as they apply new knowledge and skills in ambiguous, real-life encounters with patients who are living with complicated health problems. Humanities-based education can help both sides of the relationship: programs are shown to reduce burnout and mental health issues in young physicians, and can also help learning practitioners grapple with the most difficult aspects of their craft: how does one persuade patients on a course of treatment, while respecting informed consent? How does one work with families? How does one listen to and treat patients exhibiting self-harm tendencies? Available research may demonstrate the efficacy of such exposures, but provide little practical advice or resources for setting up programs across specialty and sub-specialty disciplines. Health Humanities in Post-Graduate Medical Education will fill this gap in knowledge translation for the thousands of residency programs worldwide, allowing educators, supervisors, and residents themselves to create robust and educationally sound workshops, seminars, study groups, lecture series, research and arts-based projects, publications and events.

The field of the medical humanities is developing rapidly, however, there has also been parallel concern from sceptics that the value of medical humanities educational interventions should be open to scrutiny and evidence. Just what is the impact of medical humanities provision upon the education of medical students? In an era of limited resources, is such provision worth the investment? This innovative text addresses these pressing questions, describes the contemporary territory comprising the medical humanities in medical education, and explains how this field may be developed as a key medical education component for the future. Bleakley, a driving force of the international movement to establish the medical humanities as a core and integrated provision in the medical curriculum, proposes a model that requires collaboration between patients, artists, humanities scholars, doctors and other health professionals, in developing medical students’ sensibility (clinical acumen based on close noticing) and sensitivity (ethical, professional and humane practice). In particular, this text focuses upon how medical humanities input into the curriculum can help to shape the identities of medical students as future doctors who are humane, caring, expressive and creative – whose work will be technically sound but considerably enhanced by their abilities to communicate well with patients and colleagues, to empathise, to be adaptive and innovative, and to act as ‘medical citizens’ in shaping a future medical culture as a model democracy where social justice is a key aspect of medicine. Making sense of the new wave of medical humanities in medical education scholarship that calls for a ‘critical medical humanities’, Medical Humanities and Medical Education incorporates a range of case studies and illustrative and practical examples to aid integrating medical humanities into the medical curriculum. It will be important reading for medical educators and others working with the medical education community, and all those interested in the medical humanities.