ABSTRACT
By the turn of the millennium, a “first wave” of medical humanities in medical education could be considered as a global phenomenon. The medical humanities also developed as an inter-disciplinary study of medical cultures, eschewing application within medical education. A “second wave” “critical” medical humanities developed interests in ethics and politics, focused on gender, ethnicity, neurodiversity, and the growing healthcare fallout from the climate crisis and associated mass migrations. Innovative new medical schools developed more integrated medical humanities programmes. Peninsula (UK) was the first school to develop an integrated, process-driven, core, compulsory, and assessed medical humanities curriculum. A “third wave” “translational” medical humanities developed in Europe, that resisted seeing biomedical science as restricting medicine’s horizons, but rather encouraged dialogue between artful biomedical science and the best of the arts, humanities, and critical/qualitative social sciences. A psychoanalytically oriented “fourth wave” is posited, in which the medical humanities act as therapeutic media to address medicine and medical education’s chronic, historical symptoms.
