ABSTRACT
What might an enlightened medical humanities curriculum look like? Peninsula Medical School’s (UK) inaugural curriculum is taken as a blueprint. Based on Curriculum Reconceptualisation process models, rather than content-led syllabus thinking, the Peninsula experiment advertises a translational model of medical humanities, progressing to a therapeutic approach to medical education’s longstanding symptoms. The medical humanities can gain traction by supporting the best of biomedical science education’s innovations as it offers alternatives to reductive approaches such as functional teaching and learning of clinical and communication skills in simulated settings. This process treats pedagogy as resistant to “information” embracing, rather, the transitions to “knowledge” and then “wisdom” or “meaning”. The fundamental approach at Peninsula was one of staff development: to encourage pedagogic innovation, and model how biomedical science and clinical and communication skills staff could move from instrumental approaches to embrace a wider range of values such as the ethical, aesthetic, and political. This would involve high-profile artists and humanities scholars working alongside biomedical science and clinical staff to address a longstanding culture of instrumentalism.
