Medical Humanities Research Articles

Maturity model for assessing the medical humanities: a Delphi study

BackgroundBecoming a first-level discipline in China means access to more educational resources. The development of medical humanities in China has been going on for more than 40 years, and some medical schools have set up master’s and doctoral programs in medical humanities. The demand for medical humanities-related knowledge in China is also growing after COVID-19. However, medical humanities is only a second-level discipline and receives limited resources to meet the needs of society. This study aims to establish a system of indicators that can assess whether the medical humanities has a first-level discipline and provide a basis for its upgrading to a first-level.MethodsA Delphi technique was used, with the panel of expert expressing their views in a series of two questionnaires. A coefficient of variation of less than 0.2 indicates expert agreement.ResultA total of 25 experts participated in this Delphi study. Consensus was reached on 11 first-grade indices and 48 s-grade indices. The authoritative coefficient(Cr) of the experts was 0.804, which indicates that the experts have a high level of reliability.ConclusionThis study provides a reliable foundation for the evaluation of medical humanities maturity.

The employment of art therapy to develop empathy and foster wellbeing for junior doctors in a palliative medicine rotation - a qualitative exploratory study on acceptability

BackgroundThe interdisciplinary realm of medical humanities explores narratives and experiences that can enhance medical education for physicians through perspective-taking and reflective practice. However, there is a gap in comprehension regarding its appropriateness at the postgraduate level, especially when utilising art therapists as faculty. This study aims to assess the acceptability of an innovative art therapy-focused educational initiative among junior doctors during a palliative care rotation, with the goal of cultivating empathy and promoting well-being.MethodsA qualitative research project was conducted at the Division of Supportive and Palliative Care (DSPC) in the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS). The study involved the recruitment of junior doctors who had successfully completed a three-month palliative care rotation program, spanning from January 2020 to April 2021. In a single small-group session lasting 1.5 h, with 3 to 4 participants each time, the individuals participated in activities such as collage making, group reflection, and sharing of artistic creations. These sessions were facilitated by an accredited art therapist and a clinical psychologist, focusing on themes related to empathy and wellbeing. To assess the acceptability of the program, two individual interviews were conducted three months apart with each participant. An independent research assistant utilised a semi-structured question guide that considered affective attitude, burden, perceived effectiveness, coherence, and self-efficacy. Thematic analysis of the transcribed data was then employed to scrutinise the participants’ experiences.ResultsA total of 20 individual interviews were completed with 11 participants. The three themes identified were lack of pre-existing knowledge of the humanities, promotors, and barriers to program acceptability.ConclusionsThe participants have mixed perceptions of the program’s acceptability. While all completed the program in its entirety, the acceptability of the program is impeded by wider systemic factors such as service and manpower needs. It is vital to address these structural limitations as failing to do so risks skewing current ambivalence towards outright rejection of future endeavours to integrate humanities programs into medical education.

IJCM_32A: Attitude of Medical Students Regarding Empathy towards Patients in a Medical College in Mangalore

Background: The incorporation of medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field of medicine, in medical education may offer significant benefits to the medical community. This study was done to assess the attitude of medical students regarding empathy towards patients and to find out the perception of students about the inclusion of humanity studies to their undergraduate medical curriculum. Methodology: It was a Cross-sectional study done among Final Year MBBS Part One and Part Two, Post Graduate Students of Clinical Specialities and Interns of Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore and its associated teaching hospitals. Data was collected using semi-structured questionnaire which consisted of three sections including Participant information, Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy – Student’s Version (JSPE-S) which will be used to measure empathy towards patients among medical students and questions on assessing the perception of students regarding the introduction of humanity studies in the medical curriculum. The collected data were entered and analyzed using SPSS version 11.5. Likert scale was analysed using median (±2SD). For qualitative data statistical test Chi-square was used Results: The mean age of the 410 students who were surveyed was 22.11 with a standard deviation of ± 2.136. 41% of the respondents were male and 59% were female. The Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy is measured on a scale of 20-140. Among the participants, 167 (40.7%) students scored between 46-90, categorized according to the Jefferson Scale as moderately empathetic. 243 students scored between 91-140 - categorized as high empathetic. None of the students scored between 20-45 (least empathetic category) Conclusion: Our study found that all the respondents were either moderately or highly empathetic according to the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy. A majority of respondents felt that it is important to understand the feelings and body language of the patient and that the emotions of the patient and family are important in the physician-patient relationship.

강의계획서에 기반한 의과대학 교육과정 분석

This study aims to analyze the syllabi of all courses in the A Medical School curriculum, including basic medicine, preclinical, clinical practice, medical humanities and social sciences, and student research programs. The purpose is to evaluate the appropriateness of each component and utilize the results as a basis for curriculum improvement. The main research findings are as follows. First, the curriculum objectives present clinical competence, competence as a medical scientist and educator, and competence as a professional and leader in order to achieve the graduation outcomes of the medical school. However, there are not many courses dealing with professional and leadership competencies in the basic medicine and preclinical education courses, so they need to be strengthened through curriculum improvement. Second, various teaching methods such as lectures, PBL, practice, discussion, and presentation are utilized. Appropriate teaching methods are used according to the characteristics of each course. Third, student assessment is conducted through written exams, assignments, practice, and learning attitude to evaluate knowledge, skills, and attitude. Written exams, learning attitude, and attendance are mostly included in all courses. Fourth, feedback is an essential element of competency-based education. A Medical School plans feedback for each course, and the feedback plan was more than 80%. When feedback was planned as a group, it mainly consisted of quizzes and problem solving, and the proportion of individual feedback was high in the clinical practice and student research courses. Although most courses have feedback plans, it is necessary to specify the timing and method of feedback. Through the results of the study, it was confirmed that the A Medical School curriculum has a foundation for competency-based education, but some courses need improvement. It is expected that the quality of medical education will be improved if the syllabi are appropriately established and implemented in the future.

Building a Culture of Integrity in Hospitals (Colleges) in the Context of Medical Humanities Tradition Exploration and Practice—The First Hospital Affiliated to a University in China as an Example

Building a Culture of Integrity in Hospitals (Colleges) in the Context of Medical Humanities Tradition Exploration and Practice—The First Hospital Affiliated to a University in China as an Example

Investigation of clinical medicine undergraduates’ recognition of narrative medicine

BackgroundNarrative Medicine (NM), a contemporary medical concept proposed in the 21st century, emphasizes the use of narrative as a literary form in medicine. This study aims to explore the understanding about NM and willingness to learn NM among medical students in our hospital.MethodsA questionnaire survey was conducted among 130 students at Xiangya Medical College of Central South University.ResultsThe findings revealed that a small percentage of students (3.1%) were familiar with narrative medicine and its training methods. Knowledge about the treatment skills (77.7%) and core content (55.4%) of narrative medicine was limited among the students. Despite this, a majority (63.1%) expressed a lack of interest in further understanding and learning about narrative medicine. Surprisingly, the survey indicated that students possessed a high level of narrative literacy, even without formal training in narrative medicine. Additionally, over half of the surveyed students (61.5%) believed that narrative medicine could benefit their clinical practice.ConclusionsThis study serves as a preliminary basis for the future development of narrative medicine education in China. It highlights the need to prioritize medical humanities education and provide medical students with more opportunities to access information on narrative medicine. By doing so, we can strive to enhance the visibility and promote the integration of narrative medicine into medical humanities education in China.

Medical students’ perceptions of integrating social media into a narrative medicine programme for 5th-year clerkship in Taiwan: a descriptive qualitative study

BackgroundThe growing demands in integrating digital pedagogies in learning (e.g., social media) contribute to disrupting many fields, including the medical humanities education. However, the strengths and barriers behind social media and medical humanities context are blurred and contradictive. We examined the perceptions of integrating social media – Facebook – into a narrative medicine (NM) programme for 5th -year clerkship in Taiwan.MethodsWe used purposive sampling to recruit participants. Sixteen medical students (Female/Male: 7/9) participated in four group interviews. Semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted to explore students’ perceptions and experiences of the social media integrated into the NM programme. We analysed the data using a descriptive thematic analysis with a team-based approach. Data were managed and coded using ATLAS.ti version 9.0.ResultsWe identified six main themes: (1) Positive experiences of social media integration; (2) Negative experiences of social media integration; (3) Barriers on writing and sharing NM stories in social media; (4) Barriers on reading NM stories in social media; (5) Barriers on reacting contents in social media; (6) Suggestions for future improvement.ConclusionsThe study revealed the strengths and barriers from medical students’ perceptions, when integrating social media into a NM programme. It is important to match students’ experiences, barriers, and perceptions towards learning. Understanding participants’ suggestions for future improvement are also crucial. With this knowledge, we might better develop the social media integration systems that achieve our desired outcomes based on the medical humanities education curricula.

Current Status and Improvement Strategies for Medical Humanities Education in Medical Schools

With the increasing demand for humanistic qualities in the healthcare industry, the importance of medical humanities education in cultivating high-quality medical talents is continuously growing. Medical humanities education not only involves the study of medical knowledge but more importantly, focuses on cultivating students' compassion, ethical perspectives, communication skills, and sense of social responsibility. However, there are some challenges faced by medical schools in implementing humanities education, such as insufficient educational resources, unreasonable course settings, and a lack of effective practical teaching. In view of this, this paper aims to analyze the current status of medical humanities education and propose improvement strategies based on this analysis, in order to promote the development of medical humanities education and better meet the comprehensive quality requirements of medical talents demanded by society.

Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)

ABSTRACT This article posits the concept of excremental toxicity as a critical lens with which to explore the resistive and subversive ways in which pollution that is dumped onto precarious ecologies is reimagined in postcolonial writing beyond the norms of silencing that govern its distribution and police its visibility. Focusing on waste in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I analyze the novel’s construction of alternative decolonial and anti-capitalist configurations, affordances, and imaginaries of toxicity – both as substance caught in a nexus of racialized, neocolonial and settler-colonial, and consumer capitalist structures, as well as a modality of materialization that arbitrates on what appears in public perception as a legitimate field of mattering and what is displaced to the unseeable margins. These alternative configurations tackle toxicity’s invisibilization through strategies of externalization that seek to materialize toxic politics in various eco-somatic ways by bringing corporeality, particularly disabled, impaired, pathological corporealities to the forefront of cultural inquiry. Methodologically situating itself at the intersection of medical humanities, waste, and toxicity studies and drawing on Morton and Boyer’s formulation of the “hyposubject,” this article examines literary configurations of medico-juridical pathologies in the context of ecological devastation and contemporary neoliberal resurgences of racial imaginaries and extractivist practices.

On the Lookout for a Crack: Disruptive Becomings in Karoline Georges's Novel Under the Stone.

Informed by medical science and biotechnology, Karoline Georges's novel Under the Stone offers a reflection on suffering bodies and imagines responses to an overwhelming sense of fear and passivity that embodied trauma and the world's many crises can create. In line with the editors' reclaiming of the milieu for the medical humanities, I draw on Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy and Sara Ahmed's notions of stranger and encounter for reading the novel's spatialization of oppressive power dynamics and its imagination of subversive emergence. I also complicate the literary text's discourse on space and body by relying on wonder studies to examine further its alternative forms of careful attunement enacted through the protagonist's affective and disembodied awakening, the latter fueled by his escape from "the incessant movement of automatic components that delineat[e] [his] presence in the world" (Georges 2016, 61). Happening from and because of the Tower's milieu, this escape becomes a mitigating force to physical, affective, and social struggles. I thus contend that Georges's text provides thought-provoking material about the functions and effects of art for addressing the dangers and promises of bioethics, body sovereignty, and life protection.

Foreclosed futurity and genres of care in Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room

ABSTRACT Medical humanities scholars such as Arthur Frank have long argued that subjects being able to tell the story of their lives within a coherent, linear temporal framework is beneficial to the patient’s wellbeing. These models for understanding patient identity, however, often provide a binary model of identity where a subject either has a coherent, linear life narrative, or is a “narrative wreck.” This article argues against the supposition that a comprehensible life trajectory is necessary for narrative self-articulation. It does this through theorizing a concept of foreclosed futurity to describe when a narrative is written without the sense of a clear and foreseeable future. Through engaging with John Frow’s formalist analysis of genre, and the affect theory of Lauren Berlant and Brian Massumi, this article provides a reading of Barbara Peabody’s The Screaming Room that demonstrates how narrative identity can be maintained within the “crisis ordinariness” of a foreclosed future.

Cine Medicine in Indian Scenario: A SWOT Analysis.

Cinema has the ability to convey important messages in an engaging and interesting manner. Cine medicine also known as cinema medicine or Cinemeducation has the potential to teach medical students and healthcare professionals about various aspects of medical conditions and illnesses. It is an innovative approach that can enhance empathy among the students and understanding toward patients with various medical conditions. Indian cinema has played a significant role in promoting health awareness and educating people about various medical conditions. Cinemeducation/Cine medicine can be instrumental in inculcating ethics and professionalism among budding clinicians. Of late, medical educationists have understood its importance and have introduced this innovative method in teaching not only medical humanities but medicine per se. This article aims to summarize the strengths, weaknesses opportunities, and threats analysis of the cine medicine along with reviews of Indian cinema for emphasizing the medical condition depicted in these cinemas/movies.

Development of a Medical Humanities Course Based on Design Thinking and Medical Students’ Perceptions

Amid the increasing interest in medical humanities education, this study developed a medical humanities course that utilized design thinking to foster creative thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that pre-medical students should possess. The course’s efficacy was assessed by evaluating improvements in core design thinking skills. The present study was conducted among 83 first-year medical students after planning and implementing a design thinking course. The reflection journals written by students along the course of the class were examined using the template analysis technique to evaluate the effectiveness of the class. The study’s primary findings showed the successful development of step-by-step medical humanities education content utilizing design thinking and its practical implementation in a class. Moreover, the course improved students’ core design thinking skills effectively, and in a balanced way. These results illustrate the effective application of design thinking in medical school through a medical humanities course. These findings indicate that a medical humanities course can help medical students showcase their abilities to collaborate and solve problems in the real world. This paper suggests the need for further research to develop a curriculum that integrates design thinking and investigate the relationship between medical students’ core competencies and design thinking-based courses.

The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath's first-person narrative of core elements for diagnosing and treating clinical depression

SUMMARY The Bell Jar (1963) is a semi-autobiographical novel written by the confessional poet, novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). It has been often cited as a recommended reading within the medical humanities, because of its powerful description of depression and the understanding-by-experience of the related psychiatric treatments. This brief article, primarily directed at the clinically oriented reader, presents a selection of excerpts from The Bell Jar to illustrate the main diagnostic features of clinical depression and the vital role of therapeutic relationship quality in hindering or facilitating treatment outcomes and recovery.

Our Newspaper as Care: Narrative Approaches in Fanon's Psychiatry Clinic.

This paper argues that the newspaper Notre Journal enshrined the importance of narrative in the revolutionary psychiatry of its founder and editor, Frantz Fanon. Anchoring my analysis in the interdisciplinarity of the medical humanities, I demonstrate how care at Hôpital Blida-Joinville in colonial Algeria was mediated by the written word. I examine Fanon's physician writing and editorial texts detailing the use of narrative approaches in the clinic. As an object of care, Notre Journal's promotion of psychic healing, social actions, and engaged professional practice shaped the interactions and experiences of patients and staff. Printed and distributed to the wider institution, the newspaper created community-during an oppressive French Occupation and at the outset of the War of Independence-in addition to nurturing creativity, curiosity, solidarity, and accountability. Still, Fanon would come to recognize the limits of narrative methods amidst cultural oral traditions, illiteracy, and divergent attitudes about narrating the self.

The Business of Race-making in the Torrid Zone: Dr Jonathan Troup’s Illustrated Diary of Dominica, 1789–90

This article focuses on the manuscript diary of a Scottish doctor, Jonathan Troup, who during a truncated fifteen-month period, from 1789 to 1790, practised medicine on the island of Dominica, part of the climatic ‘torrid zone’ in the British West Indies. While the relevant textual contents of his diary are already familiar to scholars of medical humanities, the analysis seeks to complement and extend these existing discussions by addressing an aspect of the illustrated and inscribed pages of Troup’s diary that has not been previously discussed, namely his diurnal account of race-making. The article argues that Troup was a product of Scottish enlightenment medical training, with its blended curricula of medicine, natural history and moral philosophy. The diary in turn, is shown to be a product of the diagnostic tools of that education, which equipped practitioners with the skills to classify human diversity through careful observation in the ‘colonial field’. In his diurnal sketches, Troup employs a tiered racial system or calculus of colour to differentiate between peoples of different races, based on the visual proximity of their skin to either European whiteness or shades of blackness associated with African descent. In the textual descriptions that variously accompany, envelope, elucidate and ignore the drawings, Troup’s race-making schema is shown to be informed by factors other than the gradations of skin complexion, including social temper and moral temperament. Such factors are given particular prominence in his discussion of multi-racial women, making gender an innate constituent of his race-making schema. The article is framed by the concept of business, which for most professionals in the Caribbean involved more than one economic occupation. It offers a prognosis as to the significance of Troup’s diary for a range of academic disciplines, historical, literary and visual, and their discreet historiographies which pertain to his imperial careering.

Reclaiming the 'person' and advocacy for good clinical care in psychiatric residency training through medical humanities.

Reclaiming the 'person' and advocacy for good clinical care in psychiatric residency training through medical humanities.

Medical Humanism in Vikas Swarup's the Accidental Apprentice and Arundhati Roy's the Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The paper aims to focus on an interwoven between Medical and Humanism. At this phase, when Vikas Swarup's The Accidental Apprentice and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness appears to be more an existing reality through the various incidents and how Medical Humanism interrelated to Medical Mafia, health care with honesty, empathy, compassion, altruism, respect to dignity and beliefs of the patients and their families. The emerging era is interlinked with science spills and also influences in literature. Various literary fictions reflects simply mirroring the facts and reproduce the scientific knowledge.

Mind-Body Mantra: Unleashing the Potentials of Life through Mind-Body Medicine illustrated in the Essays of Swami Vivekananda and Deepak Chopra

Good bodily and mental health is a condition of well-being. We may keep our bodies in good health by embarking on a quest to explore the deepest corners of our minds. The practical and scientific approaches for comprehending the relationship between the mind and body are the main emphasis of the study. Through their writings, Deepak Chopra and Swami Vivekananda emphasize the vitality of the fountain known as consciousness as a prelude to awareness, focus, and purpose - all of which are subsequently incorporated into medical procedures like radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery. Both the writers’ literary works highlight and discuss ancient Indian life sciences like Yoga and Ayurveda as well as Western Medicine. Through the field of Medical Humanities, the intersection of Literature, Philosophy, and Medical Science, this research will engage significant elements required for the purpose. Thus, the research delves into both the physiological and psychological facets of preserving bodily health.

Reading Neurocognitive Disorder

The multiple uses of Humanities in teaching Medicine need hardly detailing; suffice to say that a number of top Medical Schools have included Medical Humanities in their curricula. In this context we will consider the way Eugène Ionesco can be put to good use when it comes to teaching neurocognitive disorder; his theatre, come to think of “The Bald Soprano,” focuses on non-sequiturs, dislocated language and distorted logic – all of these being unfailing expressions of a cognitive impairment or even demise.