ABSTRACT
The chapter concentrates on humanities provision and does not mention the employment of arts practitioners, a prominent bias in the North American literature. This is important because Wear argues for a medical humanities that confounds disciplinary interests so that the medical humanities themselves does not come to discipline medical students but rather to liberate them from the constraints of medical disciplining. The medical humanities first developed an identity in the USA, where the term was coined in 1948. Barr argues that American doctors in the 1870s, who had visited Germany particularly to study laboratory sciences, started a long revolution in medical education that was brought to a head by the Flexner Report in 1910. Whereas bioethics and the medical humanities have traditionally been closely aligned in North American medical education, this has not been the case in the United Kingdom for example, where the establishment of ethics and law as compulsory study in the undergraduate curriculum.
