ABSTRACT
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to medical education, patient care and scientific research whose members include all accredited US and Canadian medical schools, over 400 teaching hospitals and health systems and over 80 academic societies. In summer 2017, AAMC leadership convened a ‘thought forum,’ bringing together active scholars, educators, clinicians and administrators to understand the current landscape of the arts and humanities in medical education and to create parity with the biosciences and social sciences. There are many such anecdotes in the field of health humanities, which seemingly rest on the assumption that if one has made some study of literature or art history, for example, then one is qualified to teach a text or interpret a painting. Teaching humanities disciplines with increasing complexity involves a fuller engagement with whatever text is under study—a film, a painting or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
