Our research team conducted a large-scale literature review of health humanities teaching publications to track the evolution of its methods, trends, and hints on where we might be headed. After decades of piecemeal integration, the health humanities now appear to be evolving at a dizzying pace. Catalyzing H.E.A.L. (Humanities Education and Anticolonial Learning) Medicine is a scoping review of 432 peer-reviewed articles that specifically address the inclusion of humanities and arts methods and methodologies in the education and professionalization of healthcare workers. We included peer-reviewed articles in global contexts, published in English and French, and spanning the timeframe of 1970 to 2022. This paper reports on 11 key categories of assessment. Results show a growing shift in instructor leadership from medical to humanities backgrounds, a wider variety in arts methods and collaborating disciplines, and an increase in intrinsic values as pedagogical aims. While language-based arts and university classrooms remain dominant, non-linguistic arts methods and alternative learning spaces are on the rise. The increased diversity in aims, collaborating disciplines, and evaluation methods points to a more interdisciplinary and social justice-oriented future. We hope that our data will shed valuable light on where the medical humanities have been and what may be on the horizon.

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, is one of the most influential Italian authors of the early twentieth century. His work offers an exact and humane vision of childhood at a time when paediatrics was still emerging as a distinct discipline.This essay explores selected stories from the collection Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for One Year) that depict childhood illness, vulnerability and care. Fragile newborns and neglected or exploited children are shown as shaped not only by disease but also by poverty, limited medical knowledge and cultural beliefs. Through these narratives, Pirandello anticipates key concerns of contemporary medical humanities: the importance of integrating empathy and awareness into paediatric care to help clinicians remain humane in their practice.

Often, the medical humanities are framed as a corrective to various instrumental inclinations within biomedicine. The humanities, according to this formulation, represent a point of departure from instrumental thinking, a means by which the arts intervene to combat biomedicine's more technological tendencies. Drawing from philosophers of technology Bernard Stiegler and Martin Heidegger, I challenge this formulation, arguing that narrative-a multidisciplinary tool of the medical humanities-is itself a tool and therefore a technology. Rather than asking if narrative is a technology, scholars within the medical humanities would be better served by asking what kind of technology we wish narrative to be. The answer that I forward-explicitly instrumental-is that narrative is a constitutive technology, a tool by which humans reinstantiate order in the wake of technological disruption. Rather than resisting technology, narrative provides a tool for responding to technological change. As biomedicine continues its own technological turn-consider, for example, the rapid development of medical applications of generative artificial intelligence and the emergence of precision medicine-such a lens has become increasingly necessary, equipping the medical field with tools to expand analysis of emerging technologies beyond the twin lenses of costliness and effectiveness.

Scenario planning and the medical humanities: envisioning the futures of health and healthcare.

The COVID-19 pandemic generated a distinctive body of narrative writing that sought to make sense of front-line medical experience under conditions of uncertainty and crisis. This article examines Emma Goldberg's Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in the Pandemic (2021) as a mediated, multivoiced account of early career physicians navigating professional, ethical and embodied transformation during COVID-19. Drawing on Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities scholarship, the analysis introduces the concept of the 'third object' to examine how experience, memory and moral meaning are collaboratively reconstructed through interview-based story-telling rather than autobiographical memoir. In contrast to British COVID physician memoirs, such as Rachel Clarke's Breathtaking, which foreground first-person, retrospective self-narration within the institutional context of the National Health Service (NHS), Life on the Line operates through editorial mediation, creating a relational narrative space in which embodied knowledge and ethical reflection are collectively produced. Through close reading of Goldberg's six physician profiles, the article explores embodiment, memory, moral witnessing and professional formation under pandemic conditions. It argues that mediated story-telling functions as an ethical and epistemic intermediary during periods of epistemic collapse, extending Narrative Medicine beyond memoir-based models and contributing to ongoing debates in Medical Humanities about narrative form, care and meaning in crisis. This article finds that during COVID-19, narrative mediation did not merely record medical experience but became the primary mechanism through which clinicians reconstructed epistemic stability, ethical orientation and professional identity when clinical knowledge itself was unstable.

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates the intricate connections between ideas of virality and translation in Orhan Pamuk's novel Veba Geceleri (2021), and its translation into English by Ekin Oklap, Nights of Plague (2022), from the perspective of translation as contagion. To this end, it discusses instances of transfiction, the East-West dichotomy, and heteroglossia in the plot. The study concludes that the novel's plot devices – namely, the translation of European scientific texts into Ottoman, and the island's linguistic diversity – appear designed to foreground the East-West divide and its intra-communal counterpart: the tension between traditional narratives and those shaped by Western rationality and biomedicine. However, these particularistic representations collapse in the international reception of the English translation, as the work is reframed within an intertextual network spanning languages, genres, and historical periods. The study aims to contribute to Translational Medical Humanities, and to debates on modern Turkish fiction in English translation.

Situated at the intersection of translation ethics and medical humanities, this study examines how ethical witnessing is negotiated in Ala Bashir’s memoir The Insider: Trapped in Saddam’s Brutal Regime (2005) and its Arabic counterpart (كنت طبيباً لصدام). The research addresses the central question of how a physician’s testimony, shaped by translation, conveys moral responsibility under political oppression. The main aim is to explore how Bashir’s authorial voice mediates between medical duty, artistic expression, and survival within Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian context. Using the method of close bilingual textual analysis, the study investigates how translation transforms the physician’s ethical position from a local act of witnessing into a transnational discourse on professional conscience. The findings reveal that translation operates not merely as a linguistic transfer but as a moral rearticulation, reframing the physician’s complicity and resistance within global narratives of trauma and healing. The study contributes to the growing field of Arab medical humanities by demonstrating the ethical and translational significance of physician memoirs. It concludes by recommending further interdisciplinary research into translated medical testimonies as resources for cross-cultural discussions of medical ethics and moral resilience

Medical humanities, an interdisciplinary field, analyzes illness narratives to study the representation of disease, medicine and medical professionals. Among the illness memoirs, the patient as well as the doctor narratives became popular, as majority of the readers experienced a therapeutic relief of their hidden fears related with disease and death. The victory of modern medicine, challenges faced by the medical professionals and the doctor-patient relationship are the main themes of medical memoirs. The present study focuses on the doctor memoirs and it tries to study how far bioethical concepts have influenced the depiction of medical experience by doctors.

Vulvodynia is a poorly understood chronic pain condition that has attracted a range of investigations aimed at identifying biological, psychological and social factors potentially contributing to its aetiology and maintenance. Recently, there has been a call by pain science researchers to classify vulvodynia as a central sensitisation syndrome without relevant nociception, warranting a biopsychosocial as opposed to strictly biomedical approach to care. Framed through autoethnographic storytelling, this article troubles the current biopsychosocial approach to vulvodynia in research and practice, particularly the emphasis on psychometric testing, positive affect and makeover logics of personal transformation, as well as the disavowal and pathologisation of patient critique. It does so by drawing upon disability studies research, challenging the neoliberal logics of purportedly biopsychosocial approaches as well as feminist scholarship implicating gendered forms of power in creating challenges for those with vulvodynia, as opposed to maladaptive psychology or poor critical literacy. The article argues for structural competency and a medical humanities component in chronic pain education and advocates for a greater feminist and disability-informed presence in vulvodynia research and activism.

Pierre Fauchard is frequently cited in textbooks and monographs on the history of dentistry and is widely recognized for his significant role in the development of early modern dental practice. However, existing studies tend to focus on his personal anecdotes or specific technical innovations, and have yet to address the fundamental question on why Fauchard has received such scholarly appraisal from the broader perspective of dental history. Drawing on Fauchard's biography, his seminal work The Surgeon Dentist, or Treatise on the Teeth, and interactions with the scholarly community of his time, this study systematically analyzes his key contributions to dental theory, clinical practice, and the formation of professional dental identity. This research helps fill a gap in Chinese-language scholarship and provides useful insights for the study of dental history and medical humanities education.

Healthcare education is increasingly moving beyond the biomedical paradigm to incorporate medical humanities, highlighting a person-centred approach. Integrative medicine encompasses biomedical sciences as well as social and cultural factors to treat the whole person, focusing on optimal health and healing. These shifts are evident in the rise of competency-based frameworks that aim to integrate ethical values, cultural sensitivity and interdisciplinary knowledge. Despite these developments, limited research has examined how such frameworks differ across countries and health professions based on distinct academic traditions and conceptual emphases. To address this research gap, this study conducted a comparative analysis of seven national-level health professional competency frameworks for six countries: the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Korea and China. Using Mayring's structured content analysis method, documents were analysed across four categories: competency domains, keyword mapping, structural features and sociocultural characteristics. To support interpretive depth, the Health Systems Science (HSS) framework was applied as a lens for understanding conceptual convergence and divergence in the person-centred approach. While all seven frameworks highlighted core areas such as communication, professionalism and patient-centred care, their structures and value orientations varied. The frameworks for the UK and Australia focused on moral accountability, while those for the USA and Canada emphasised functional and systems-based competencies. Frameworks for China and South Korea reflected traditional philosophies and professional identity formation. The HSS framework offered a valuable structure for aligning both topic-based domains and personal attributes across diverse educational systems, especially highlighting a person-centred approach to consolidate integrative medicine. The findings suggest that while each framework has distinct strengths, gaps remain-particularly in addressing social competencies, such as advocacy and cultural sensitivity. These areas warrant further integration, education and validation to support socially accountable and systems-oriented professional development.

ABSTRACT This article examines Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye through the proposed framework of the Dermogrotesque which positions the skin as the primary site where social, medical, and aesthetic meanings intersect and are inscribed. By focusing on Chinaski’s acne, the analysis draws on Foucault, Siebers, and other critical theories of embodiment to trace how visibility becomes a conduit for shame, exclusion, and epistemic violence, situating Bukowski’s work within conversations on disability, aesthetic capitalism, and the socio-medical gaze. The study argues that the novel’s episodic, anti-teleological structure is inseparable from its dermogrotesque embodiment. Chinaski’s skin cannot be narratively redeemed, and Bukowski refuses the coherence, transformation, or moral clarity often expected of illness narratives. He produces a form of narrative that is ethically and formally consistent with chronic stigma – fragmented, flat, and unresolved. This reading demonstrates how Ham on Rye contributes to medical humanities by revealing the narrative and affective implications of living in a grotesquely visible skin.

Mwah: Klimt's The Kiss, other kisses, and the 'kiss' in clinical dermatology.

This study reads Peyami Safa’s Dokuzuncu Hariciye Koğuşu (Ninth Surgical Ward) as an architectural and phenomenological illness narrative that reveals how built environments shape embodied experiences of sickness. Through the perspective of an adolescent bone-tubercular patient moving between hospital corridors, decaying wooden houses, and an elite köşk, the novel articulates what I call ecologies of rot—the material and affective entanglements between vulnerable bodies and vulnerable architecture. Drawing on medical humanities, sensory studies, and health and environmental humanities, I demonstrate that the protagonist finds coherence in spaces marked by decay while experiencing misattunement in refined, “ideal” settings. The novel thereby challenges universal notions of “healing environments,” anticipating current debates in healthcare design. I propose that flexible, adaptable spaces—those allowing forms of environmental autonomy—offer a more responsive architecture of care, attentive to the shifting sensory and emotional needs of their occupants. Keywords: Rot, decay, regeneration, illness narrative, health and environmental humanities, flexible design

This reflective essay explores my experience as a nonmedical volunteer at a palliative care centre, in Elamkulam Panchayat, in the Malappuram district of Kerala for two weeks in October 2023 as a master’s student of Medical Humanities. It examines how palliative care functions in a community setting, addressing the needs of terminally ill patients. Through direct observations and interactions, I reflect on how the decentralised, interdisciplinary and flexible nature of palliative care service transcends some limitations of modern clinical medicine, offering a holistic approach that embraces individual subjectivity, challenges hierarchical structures, and fosters a profound, compassionate connection with patients.

Objective: This study investigates the current situation of general practice medical students’ professional feelings from the perspective of professional feelings, discusses the main factors affecting professional feelings, and provides more scientific and reasonable countermeasures for the training of general practice medical students, so that more general practice medical students can go down and stay. Methods: The general practice medical students enrolled in Wenzhou Medical University from 2019 to 2023 were surveyed, and SPSS25.0 statistical software was used for data analysis. Results: The professional feelings of general practice medical students were at an upper moderate level. There were significant differences in professional feelings between gender, grade, motivation for applying and whether they had participated in internship/practice (p<0.05). The professional feelings of boys, juniors, students who voluntarily applied for the exam due to personal interests, and students who participated in internships/practices were significantly higher than other students. There was no statistical significance for variables such as political appearance, student source, household registration type, father’s occupation, annual family income, college entrance examination scores, university academic performance, and whether they had studied medical humanities courses (P>0.05). Gender, grade, and whether they have participated in internships/practices are the main factors affecting students’ professional feelings. Conclusion: Strengthen the value guidance and incorporate the elements of emotional education into the talent training program. highlight practical education and build a “early clinical” practical teaching system; Strengthen humanistic care and build an infiltration emotional cultivation model.

This article compares William Carlos Williams's short story 'The Use of Force' (1938) and Tess Gerritsen's novel The Surgeon (2001) to explore how biomedical care can slide into coercion and how clinical spaces oscillate between sanctuary and sacrilege. Building on Michel Foucault's formulation of clinical vision, together with Julia Kristeva's account of abjection and René Girard's sacrificial theory, I propose a three-strand analytic-power/knowledge, Gothic embodiment and parareligious affect-supplemented by an ecoGothic perspective that scales clinical violence from flesh to environment. Through close reading, the essay shows how Williams's intimate house call converts beneficent intention into brute force, while Gerritsen's medical thriller grotesquely weaponises medical expertise: the gaze that sees also dominates, and instruments of cure-tongue depressor, spoon, scalpel-become ritual implements that breach bodily borders. Attending to gendered vulnerability and trauma poetics, the analysis situates Gerritsen's femicidal surgeries within patriarchal control and foregrounds the counter-agency of Jane Rizzoli and Catherine Cordell. Placing a modernist vignette beside a 21st century medical thriller, the article maps both continuities and ruptures in the ontological, epistemic and ethical stakes of clinical authority, tracing how sacrificial logic, secular priesthood and toxic ecologies persist across periods. The contribution is twofold: to Gothic studies, by clarifying medicine's parasacral volatility and its ecological imaginaries; and to bioethics and the medical humanities, by articulating a normative claim that only practices disciplined by consent, narrative reciprocity and institutional accountability can sustain the secular covenant of care. Otherwise, curative ritual hardens into authorised brutality, and knowledge is purchased through a sacrificial economy in which cura collapses into cruelty. Such findings refine debates on clinical paternalism, narrative ethics and trauma representation in literature.

Abstract Background Despite the increasing emphasis on the moral character of healthcare professionals, there remains a lack of consensus on the conceptual framework of education in medical humanities and social medicine (MHSM). The framework of health systems science (HSS), which involves four foundational domains and seven core functional domains, aims to strengthen the professional competence and social responsibility of Korean medicine education. On the basis of the HSS framework, this study aims to develop competencies in Korean medicine education for MHSM. Methods A total of 20 experts related to Korean medicine participated in three rounds of the Delphi study and the Nominal Group Technique (NGT). The experts were basic Korean medicine professors, clinical Korean medicine professors, experts in Korean medicine education, and primary care clinicians. In Round 1, the experts answered the survey about competencies on the basis of the HSS framework. In Rounds 2 and 3, the experts rated their agreement with the competencies revised in the previous rounds. In the NGT, the competencies that had not reached a consensus in the Delphi study were subsequently reviewed by four experts, one from each category. Results In Round 1, five HSS domains and 11 competencies did not meet the content validity criteria. The domain names and the meaning of the domains were revised after the feedback from the expert panels was reviewed. Consensus was not achieved for three HSS domains and eight competencies in Round 2 or three HSS domains and four competencies in Round 3. After the NGT, four competencies were updated to reach a consensus on finalizing 28 final competencies. Conclusions This study introduces 28 final competencies to cultivate literacy in MHSM. These final competencies are specifically set for the Foundational Domains and Core Functional Domains in the HSS framework. This study is expected to provide a basis for future research on MHSM in Korean medicine education. Graphical abstract

This study systematically evaluated the performance of three advanced large language models (LLMs)—GPT-4.0, ERNIE Bot 4.0, and GPT-4o—in the 2023 Chinese Medical Licensing Examination. Employing a dataset of 600 standardized questions, we analyzed the accuracy of each model in answering questions from three comprehensive sections: Basic Medical Comprehensive, Clinical Medical Comprehensive, and Humanities and Preventive Medicine Comprehensive. Our results demonstrate that both ERNIE Bot 4.0 and GPT-4o significantly outperformed GPT-4.0, achieving accuracies above the national pass mark. The study further examined the strengths and limitations of each model, providing insights into their applicability in medical education and potential areas for future improvement. These findings underscore the promise and challenges of deploying LLMs in multilingual medical education, suggesting a pathway towards integrating AI into medical training and assessment practices.

Medical education has increasingly prioritized technological competence, often at the expense of humanistic values central to patient-centered care. This Mini Review examines how medical humanism and Narrative Medicine can be systematically integrated into contemporary medical education to rebalance technical expertise and humanistic care. Current evidence suggests that Narrative Medicine enhances empathy, communication skills, professional identity, and ethical sensitivity. However, integration efforts remain fragmented and are frequently constrained by curricular overload, insufficient faculty preparation, and misaligned assessment systems. Embedding Narrative Medicine within core curricula, supported by interdisciplinary collaboration, longitudinal programs, and rigorous evaluation frameworks, offers a feasible pathway toward a more holistic and sustainable medical education paradigm.