ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses why the medical humanities are needed in medical education. He adapts a post-Marxist model developed by Jacques Ranciere exploring the distribution of the fabric of the sensible in culture to argue that current habitual practices in medical education may paradoxically restrict, rather than enhance, quality of learning. The argument links a political call to democratize medical practice with an aesthetic call to promote education of the sensible, or sensibility. In each of these arguments, a block to effective practice is analysed. Karl Marx focused on the fair distribution of material wealth and the ethical use of labour, Ranciere considers the fair distribution of aesthetic and emotional capital and ethical use of aesthetic and emotional labour. Finally, the author introduces the poststructuralist feminism of Helene Cixous to suggest that education for compassionate medicine amounts to a cultivation of a necessary tenderness, even where tough-minded medical culture refuses such language and sentiment as 'soft and fluffy'.
