Striving to do good things: teaching humanities in Canadian medical schools.

Full Abstract

We provide the results of a systematic key-informant review of medical humanities curricula at fourteen of Canada's seventeen medical schools. This survey was the first of its kind. We found a wide diversity of views among medical educators as to what constitutes the medical humanities, and a lack of consensus on how best to train medical students in the field. In fact, it is not clear that consensus has been attempted - or is even desirable - given that Canadian medical humanities programs are largely shaped by individual educators' interests, experience and passions. This anarchic approach to teaching the medical humanities contrasts sharply with teaching in the clinical sciences where national accreditation processes attempt to ensure that doctors graduating from different schools have roughly the same knowledge (or at least have passed the same exams). We argue that medical humanities are marginalized in Canadian curricula because they are considered to be at odds philosophically with the current dominant culture of evidence-based medicine (EBM). In such a culture where adhering to a consensual standard is a measure of worth, the medical humanities - which defy easy metrical appraisal - are vulnerable. We close with a plea for medical education to become more comfortable in the borderlands between EBM and humanities approaches.

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Author information

Author/s: Kidd, M G (MG); Connor, J T H (JT);

Affiliation: Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador A1B 3V6, Canada. kidd@nf.sympatico.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: The Journal of medical humanities (J Med Humanit), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Mar; vol 29 (issue 1) : pp 45-54

Dates: Created 2008/01/21; Completed 2008/03/31;

PMID: 18058208, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Canada
Curriculum
Evidence-Based Medicine
Humanities - education

Humanities - education
Humans
Interviews as Topic
Schools, Medical

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