Guides @ UF: HSCL Wellness: Health Humanities

Health Humanities

We define health humanities in line with the definition on New York University's Literature, Arts and Medicine Database "We define the term "medical humanities" broadly to include an interdisciplinary field of humanities (literature, philosophy, ethics, history and religion), social science (anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, sociology), and the arts (literature, theater, film, multimedia and visual arts) and their application to healthcare education and practice. The humanities and arts provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to each other. They also offer a historical perspective on healthcare. Attention to literature and the arts helps to develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection -- skills that are essential for humane healthcare. The social sciences help us to understand how bioscience and medicine take place within cultural and social contexts and how culture interacts with the individual experience of illness and the way healthcare is practiced."

In addition, the study of arts and health is focused more specifically on the use of the arts in the clinical context- "The arts are now being used within healthcare institutions worldwide. The international arts in medicine movement represents a rediscovery of the links between body, mind and spirit and of the unity between the creative and medical arts. It recognizes and advocates the role of the imagination and creativity in developing and maintaining health. Specific applications may include workshops for health maintenance for healthcare givers or other healthy or non-hospitalized participants, bringing the arts into the hospital environment through exhibitions and/or performances, providing arts activities and workshops for patients, family members and staff, and artists facilitating creativity with patients on an individual basis."

Discussing the health humanities

Key texts in the health humanities

Medical Humanities by Thomas R. Cole; Nathan S. Carlin; Ronald A. Carson
ISBN: 9781107614178
Publication Date: 2014
This textbook brings the humanities to students in order to evoke the humanity of students. It helps to form individuals who take charge of their own minds, who are free from narrow and unreflective forms of thought, and who act compassionately in their public and professional worlds. Using concepts and methods of the humanities, the book addresses undergraduate and premed students, medical students, and students in other health professions, as well as physicians and other healthcare practitioners. It encourages them to consider the ethical and existential issues related to the experience of disease, care of the dying, health policy, religion and health, and medical technology. Case studies, images, questions for discussion, and role-playing exercises help readers to engage in the practical, interpretive, and analytical aspects of the material, developing skills for critical thinking as well as compassionate care.
Health Humanities Reader by Therese Jones
ISBN: 0813562465
Publication Date: 2014
Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that.
Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities by Alan Bleakley
ISBN: 9780815374619
Publication Date: 2019
This authoritative new handbook offers a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the state of the medical humanities globally, showing how clinically oriented medical humanities, the critical study of medicine as a global historical and cultural phenomenon, and medicine as a force for cultural change can inform each other. This book describes how the medical humanities can be used in and out of clinical settings, acting as a point of resistance, redistributing medicine’s capital amongst its stakeholders, embracing the complexity of medical instances, shaping medical education, promoting interdisciplinary understandings and recognising an identity for the medical humanities as a network effect. This book is an essential read for all students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in the medical humanities.
Medical Humanities and Medical Education by Alan Bleakley
ISBN: 9781317676256
Publication Date: 2015
The field of the medical humanities is developing rapidly, however, there has also been parallel concern from skeptics that the value of medical humanities educational interventions should be open to scrutiny and evidence. Just what is the impact of medical humanities provision upon the education of medical students? In an era of limited resources, is such provision worth the investment? This innovative text addresses these pressing questions, describes the contemporary territory comprising the medical humanities in medical education, and explains how this field may be developed as a key medical education component for the future. In particular, this text focuses upon how medical humanities input into the curriculum can help to shape the identities of medical students as future doctors who are humane, caring, expressive and creative - whose work will be technically sound but considerably enhanced by their abilities to communicate well with patients and colleagues, to empathize, to be adaptive and innovative, and to act as 'medical citizens' in shaping a future medical culture as a model democracy where social justice is a key aspect of medicine.