ABSTRACT
This chapter is written in collaboration with a senior consultant histopathologist and medical educator, Dr Robert Marshall, who first studied classics at Oxford before embarking on a career in medicine people unpacks 'empathy'. 'Empathy' is critically interrogated from within the humanities themselves, by drawing on Homer's account of 'pity' in the Iliad. Here, it is fiction that does the work for the reader of educating for empathy. One cannot help but identify with both the junior doctor heroine and the passive patient, for whom we must feel pity. 'Communication' is now widely regarded within medical education as a component of medical 'professionalism', a learned set of skills and attitudes exhibited in performance, and open to objective measurement or assessment. Communication includes not only doctor-patient interactions, but also working with colleagues, educating students and communicating generally with the public.
