ABSTRACT
What are the origins of the medical/health humanities? The first systematic application of the arts to medicine can be traced to the birth of “art therapy” in 1945. The descriptor “medical humanities” was first used in 1948 in a history of medicine setting. While ethics and the history of medicine were being taught in North American medical schools by the 1970s, the application of disciplines such as literature did not gain traction until later. Some literature scholars interested in inter-disciplinary work found it difficult to gain acceptance in discipline-bounded University departments, and were welcomed in humanities-oriented medical schools, to broaden medical students’ horizons. Their work, however, largely remained as “handmaiden” to biomedicine, or as relaxing diversion, and was opposed by biomedical scientists and physicians complaining that the medicine curriculum was overstretched. This content orientation to medical humanities in the medical education curriculum would linger, obscuring the fact that the medical humanities might be seen as process, as ways of increasing the value of functional biomedical science, and clinical and communication skills.
