Medical humanities: an e-module at the University of Manchester.

The importance of humanities in the medical curriculum is increasingly recognized. For example, in the United Kingdom, The General Medical Council (GMC), which is an independent body established under the Medical Act 1858 and responsible, among other things, for fostering good medical practice and promoting high standards of medical education, in its publication Tomorrow’s Doctors, encouraged inclusion of humanities in the medical curriculum. Literature, arts, poetry, and philosophy are thought to foster the doctors’ ability to ‘‘communicate with patients, to penetrate more deeply into the patient’s wider narrative, and to seek more diverse ways of promoting well being and reducing the impact of illness or disability.’’ The Institute of Medical Ethics, as well as several other organizations including the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, has also fostered the incorporation of literature and arts in the undergraduate medical curriculum. In response to the calls for broader humanistic input, the Medical School in Manchester accepted a proposal to include a Medical Humanities Module (MHM) in the undergraduate medical curriculum. In this paper, I explain the aims and content of the MHM. I thus wish to share an innovative teaching tool with any interested medical ethics educator. I hope to inspire other medical ethics teachers to draw on sources other than jurisprudence and applied ethics for the teaching of medical ethics and law, even at an undergraduate level. I also wish to offer some practical ideas of themes and teaching material that could be incorporated into an ethics and law curriculum. It is important to note that this MHM is an e-learning module. This means that all lectures, reading material, questions for discussion and interactive learning happen in the virtual learning environment (VLE). I will show how e-learning can help medical educators to meet some of the challenges in medical education and will discuss the pros and cons of this relatively novel method of delivery.