ABSTRACT
The patient is drunk, homeless, and seriously ill—the kind of patient health care professionals receive with dread. Empathy for the patient, the supposed lubricant of medical interactions, is glaringly absent. Empathy in fact is regarded as a healing modality in its own right, not just as a means of facilitating practical outcomes such as the patient’s acceptance of, say, complex, difficult or unpleasant therapies. Empathy is as often defined within a cluster of closely allied but distinct concepts such as compassion, sympathy, empathic concern and emotional contagion. A medical humanities teaching agenda focused on the ‘edges of empathy’ should begin with an investigation of the complexities of individual empathy. ‘Edges of empathy’ should also incorporate the medical humanities in order to examine precisely in what ways empathy exerts social constraints, facilitates conversations, consolidates individual or tribal interests, or lends itself to moral regulation.
