“A Pilot Study to Understand the Role of Medical Humanities in Medical Education”
In this article, Clark Pitcher, Arya Prasad, Daniel Marchalik, Hunter Groninger, Lakshmi Krishnan and Michael Pottash study the perception of the students enrolled in the Georgetown University Medical Humanities Initiative of the benefits of a medical humanities curriculum. Based on the qualitative analysis of the reflections of students enrolled in the medical humanities pilot courses offered in the spring of 2020, ‘Medicine and Mystery,’ ‘Medical Nonfiction,’ and ‘Living and Dying’, the authors identified six themes to make sense of the role of medical humanities in medical education. The themes help capture the role that a medical humanities education can play in shaping future clinicians and demonstrate that these courses not only provided a distinct teaching methodology from the scientific classroom but also appeared to deepen the students’ understanding of the humanistic aspects of medicine and its many facets.