Making room for medical humanities.

Humanities special studies modules: making better doctors or just happier ones?

Education and debate: Developing the place of medical humanities in medical education from school to the consulting room.

In this issue’s Education and debate section Evans and Greaves describe two educational developments in medical humanities. These initiatives appear to raise two important issues in the context of developing the humanities in medical education. Evans and Greaves describe their master’s programme as being “philosophy looking at humanities disciplines looking at medicine”. This acknowledgement of...

What price dissection? Dissection literally dissected.

Hamlet: Has this fellow no feelings of his business, that he sings at grave-making? Horatio: Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. (Hamlet Act V, scene i) Hamlet is appalled by the gravedigger's insensitivity towards death and corpses. Horatio explains that the gravedigger is so accustomed to such things that he no longer shares Hamlet's seriousness. We contend that human dissectio...

"Medicalisation of falling in love": medical students' responses to Thomas Mann's The Black Swan.

The value of implementing literature in medical education is widely accepted. The initial responses of medical students to Thomas Mann's short story The Black Swan are described and their resources for making sense of the story are presented. Their written responses revealed that the students interpreted the story mainly through a medical framework and were capable of understanding the story's ...

Risk, rationality, and regret: responding to the uncertainty of childhood food anaphylaxis.

Risk and uncertainty are unavoidable in clinical medicine. In the case of childhood food allergy, the dysphoric experience of uncertainty is heightened by the perception of unpredictable danger to young children. Medicine has tended to respond to uncertainty with forms of rational decision making. Rationality cannot, however, resolve uncertainty and provides an insufficient account of risk. Thi...