Featured Event

Dorothy Porter, PhD
Chair, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History, & Social Medicine
Thursday, April 16, 2009, Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar St, 215 L Fulton Room, 3:00-4:30PM

This talk is drawn from a larger exploration of "The History of Humanism and Medical Education in the United States," which asks,  What has been role of the humanities in US academic medical centers and what should it be in the future?

When in 1957 Case Western Reserve became the first medical school in the United States to attempt to revise the Flexner Model of the medical curriculum they were driven by the primary goal of improving the acquisition of clinical competency by student physicians. The historical story behind the impetus for curriculum revision is complex including a broader debate between professional subgroups within the US medical profession as a whole. A prominent pedagogical consideration which feature! d in th e curriculum reform movement, however, was the desire to include training in the humanities to enhance clinical skills.

Controversy has subsequently continued surrounding the role of the humanities (and the social sciences) in the medical curriculum in the United States. Opinions remained divided about the purpose and boundaries of such programs of instruction ranging from stressing the need to instruct students in cultural competency to concern to introduce students to a much broader conceptualization of the complex social and cultural role of medical practice and the power of bio-medical and bio-ethical knowledge in contemporary US society and beyond in a globalized world. Though such points of view are not mutually exclusive, the emphasis that different schools have placed on the wide range of disciplines and goals offered by the humanities in medicine have had a marked effect on the nature of the programs offered, on their content and on their form.  These differences have been compounded by changing definitions of what constitutes medical humanism.

The larger project explores the development of the medical humanities in medical education in the US from the 1950s to the present day by examining their institutionalization in major academic medical centers. At the same time the project investigates attempts made at institutionalizing a definitive conceptualization of medical humanism as a discipline and its relationship to scientific humanism as an ideological/social movement.