Can humanities be taught?

Prologue Can Humanities Be Taught? This special issue of The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine is a happy occasion for its editors. The Program for Humanities in Medicine was established in 1983 to remind medical care personnel, nurses and physicians, students and faculty, of the unmeasurable aspects of medicine. A major aim, as yet unfulfilled, was to encourage faculty in the clinical disciplines to regard the humanities as their "laboratory" for improving patient care, and to help post-doctoral Ph.D.s in the humanities to spend part of their scholarly time looking at medicine. But the time is not yet ripe for clinicians on ward rounds to refer as readily to Tolstoy or Updike as to the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Over the past nine years, the Program, however, has developed a well-attended series of lectures and seminars, which are listed in the Appendix. In this issue, a sampling of that material is presented. Why should doctors and nurses read? Of what value to them is it to learn anything but science in the 1990s? Humanities have somewhere been called that "broad field of discourse that looks at culture, life, and our intellectual heritage." Literature, philosophy, history, rhetoric, and music, among others, belong in that category, for they all contribute to the life of men and women. But we must separate "humanism" from "humanities," for humanism means acting like a human being, devoted to human interests, which doesn't tell us very much. Humanities are a branch of learning, concerned with human thought and relations. They should be distinguished from science in many ways; science focuses on what is testable and provable, where the humanities look to another aspect of life, to intuition and the unmeasurable. Humanities prepare the ground for doctors and nurses to understand their patients. I like to suggest that the eye and the ear are both close to the brain, but modern medicine relies largely upon the eye. Study of the humanities reminds us that to listen is to understand. Not everyone agrees, however. "Why should I give money to entertain doctors?" more than one potential donor has asked. "Let doctors pay for their own pleasures." "I want to see them more human, not more cultured," was another rejoinder. The humanities can be regarded in that fashion, as simply providing pleasure, but many of us regard study of the humanities as an essential living experience to acquire wisdom …