ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on understanding a productive relationship between the medical humanities and biomedical ethics. Biomedical ethics and the medical humanities are fields of study and practice with both conventional and competing approaches. A conventional definition of the medical humanities is that they comprise an interdisciplinary field in which the arts, humanities, and aspects of the social sciences are applied to healthcare education and practice. Biomedical ethics and the medical humanities are both construed as ‘patient-centred’ and focused on ‘the person.’ Biomedical ethics and the medical humanities are both regarded as ‘soft’ in relation to the ‘hard’ medical sciences and clinical training. Students can be failed, and ejected from the course, for not meeting knowledge standards in biomedical science subjects, and for identified inadequacies in clinical assessments. An aesthetic approach to both biomedical ethics and to the medical humanities draws on ‘knowing how’ in supporting healthcare practised with qualitative discrimination and sensitivity.
