Medical humanities: to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always

To the Editor: Gordon, Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Sydney, suggests that “the separation of clinical care from the ‘human sciences’ is a professional and social mistake”, and that “the arts, humanities and social sciences act as a counterbalance to the relentless reductionism of the biomedical sciences”. 1 Her university now offers a Masters in Medical Humanities and the opportunity to study subjects such as Medicine and war and Medicine and music.

Gordon suggests that study of the medical humanities could result in “a more insightful view of the patient, the doctor and the health care system, and an enhanced capacity to cure, relieve and comfort”, and that “history, philosophy and sociology warn that the person with the disease is all too easily reduced to the non-hygienic, non-rational, disordered ‘other’ ”, while “the growth of medicine as an economic and rational profession has paradoxically contributed to the social diminution of the body, the very object of its focus”. 1

This warrants a response more elegant than the earthy Australian expletives that come to mind. That master of teasing irony, Jane Austen, makes gentle fun in Emma of educational establishments “which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems”.2

In an article entitled Medicine and literature, UK medical historian Neve argues “there are numerous difficulties tracing the connections between two vast areas of human effort that may not be easily twinned” and that “the desire to twin them may be an ambition more attractive to medical practitioners than to writers and artists”.3 Doctors may yearn to counter a modern perception that they are mere technicians, some by seeking to reclaim a lost identity as the last of the humanists. Neve provocatively suggests that for many modern practitioners, often “their cases are routine, unglamorous, and socially explicable in matter-of-fact terms”.3

Maybe the best approach to the humanities for anyone, including doctors, lies somewhere between the sermonising of Gordon and the temptations of escapist fantasy, such as those offered by the master of ceremonies in the movie Cabaret with his excuse that “life is disappointing, forget it”.4