Should humanities be taught?

zled by such abandonment, but literature suggests that there are many different ways of dealing with pain and suffering. Modern physicians learn to look mainly at disease, defined as whatever can be detected ("imaged") by our machinery, scanner, endoscope, or chemical analyzer. Too few learn to pay attention to illness, the patient's experiencebecause illness cannot be visualized and is hard to quantitate. Modern scientific training has led doctors to believe that every question has an answer, which can be found if only we look carefully enough. Study of the humanities, however, teaches physicians that this belief is not always true, encouraging them to look beyond the disease itself and to explore other aspects of illness. In this process, they are learning more about life, the joy and suffering of this world, and about the travails of being a patient-or a doctor. As new ethical questions arise, the humanitieswhich are the record of how men and women have looked at quandaries in the past-can help physicians to enlarge their judgments. In short, the study of humanities helps doctors and nurses to discover that patients are their own stories, that everyone has a story to tell, and that, in the telling, there sometimes comes healing. At the least, physicians can learn to put their patients, with their numbers and images, into a more human context. In this spirit, then, Robert Byck, almost a professional patient, recounts his story, while Harvey Mandell, himself a patient on more than one occasion, praises science more than sentiment. You may make your own choices, or none, but the process will make you think more about what your own metaphors for medicine may be.