Health Humanities as a New Rapidly Growing Transdisciplinary Academic Field

Abstract

Health or medical humanities is a rapidly growing transdisciplinary academic field that incorporates aspects of the arts and humanities to health and health care. It embraces various branches of humanities and social sciences such as religious studies, cultural and language studies, history, philosophy, anthropology and sociology and it has a wide-ranging application to medical education and health practices. Health humanities seeks novel ways of understanding health and illness in society, and how methods from the humanities and social studies may be brought to bear on biomedicine, clinical practice, and the politics of healthcare. Baccalaureate and Masters programmes in health humanities have been developed in the US, Canada and UK. Graduates of this programme are prepared for employment and success in many areas including, research technician, nonprofit facilitator, pharmacy manager, environmental law and policy, public health service, public administration, clinical research, marketing, media, PR, publishing & journalism, consumer & retail …etc. Therefore, this field should be studied at our universities and that should be encouraged through workshops, conferences and lectures on this issue. This study aims to improve our universities in order for them to follow suit and start to climb the world university rankings. Keywords: Medical humanities - health humanities - Anglophonic universities