Browse Items (40 total)

This essay explores the various places inhabited by doctors and patients, in order to lead doctors to a more complex understanding of their patients' experiences of illness. Using Adam Haslett's "The Good Doctor" (2002), we examine what happens when…

It would be unusual to find a current medical school administrator or faculty member who has not heard the phrase "literature and medicine" or who does not know that literature is taught in various forms-short stories, novels, poems, essays-at many…

Categories are essential to doctors' thinking and reasoning about their patients. Much of the clinical categorization learned in medical school serves useful purposes, but an extensive literature exists on students' reliance on broad systems of…

Since the emergence of the field in the 1970s, several trends have begun to challenge the original assumptions, claims, and practices of what became known as the medical humanities. In this article, the authors make the case for the health humanities…

Stories, film, drama, and art have been used in medical education to enhance empathy, perspective-taking, and openness to "otherness," and to stimulate reflection on self, others, and the world. Yet another, equally important function of the…

In this essay, I explore medical humanities practice in the United States with descriptions offered by fifteen faculty members who participated in an electronic survey. The questions posed focused on the desirability of a core humanities curriculum…

Since its publication in 1978, Samuel Shem's The House of God has sold over two million copies in over 50 countries. While it has remained popular among medical students, its value as a literary text to promote critical reflection on self and…

The author proposes a theoretical orientation for cultural competency that reorganizes common curricular responses to the study of culture in medical education. What has come to be known in medical education as cultural competency is theoretically…

The Human Values in Medicine Program (HVM) at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine is composed of 120 required hours in medical humanities, social sciences, and behavioral sciences. In addition to a required HVM month in the fourth…

The competency movement in medical education asserts itself in every corner of students' experiences from matriculation through residency. Such a focus on making sure trainees achieve desired levels of skills, knowledge, and technique is highly…

Three distinct phenomena are currently at play in medical education: (1) the pervasive use of PowerPoint in teaching, (2) the wholesale application of competency models, and (3) the shift from paper reading to screen reading regardless of course,…

Twenty-eight years after the United State Supreme Court issued its landmark Roe v. Wade, the struggle continues to ensure that all women have the full range of reproductive choices, including abortion. While the struggle can be addressed through its…

Medical schools have been slow to include meaningful end-of-life (EOL) educational experiences in their curricula. As an area of inquiry and focused clinical experience, death is "conspicuous" by its absence, reflecting a medical culture that defines…

Sexual harassment occurs with regularity during medical training, and it remains largely unreported. This study is one institution's attempt to understand how third and fourth-year medical students perceive and experience sexual harassment, what they…

INTRODUCTION: Upon designing and implementing a literature course on family values for Year 4 medical students, we found that while the supposed benefits of literary inquiry were to lead students to a deeper understanding of difficult issues such as…

In this essay we link the rationale for the medical humanities with radical hermeneutics, a move that infuses the medical humanities with incredulity and suspicion. This orientation is particularly important at this historical moment, when the…

BACKGROUND: The literature consistently reports that sexual harassment occurs with regularity in medical education, mostly in clinical settings, and most of it goes unreported. Reasons for nonreporting include the fear of retaliation, a reluctance to…

From the poetry of William Carlos Williams, the novels of Walker Percy, and the short stories of Anton Chekov to the contemporary essays of Atul Gawande, physicians' contributions to literary genres have been significant. This article explores the…

PURPOSE: To describe the attitudes of female nurses and female resident physicians toward each other in surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, and emergency medicine in one Midwest teaching hospital in the United States. METHOD: Using a…

BACKGROUND: A well-known phenomenon among U.S. medical students known as pimping, or the pedagogical device of questioning students in the clinical setting, receives virtually no attention in medical literature. PURPOSE: Identifying 4th-year medical…

There is currently little knowledge or understanding of medical students' knowledge and attitudes toward the poor. Teaching hospitals bring students face-to-face with poor and uninsured patients on a regular basis. However, an overview of the…

Cultural competency efforts have received much attention in medical education. Most efforts focus on the acquisition of knowledge and skills about various groups based on race and ethnic identity, national origins, religion, and the like. The authors…

The professional development discourse currently circulating in academic medicine owes much to the work of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and their Project Professionalism. They identify the elements of altruism, duty, excellence,…

PURPOSE: To examine perceptions of the formal, informal, and hidden curricula in psychiatry as they are observed and experienced by (1) attending physicians who have teaching responsibilities for residents and medical students, (2) residents who are…

BACKGROUND: Medical educators act on the belief that students benefit from formal and informal educational experiences that foster virtues such as compassion, altruism, and respect for patients. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to examine…

Using Rene Magritte's well-known painting The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe), we argue that the current focus on competencies throughout medical education can sometimes lead educators to rely too heavily on scores, checkmarks, or other…

During the past decade, "reflection" and "reflective writing" have become familiar terms and practices in medical education. The authors of this article argue that the use of the terms requires more thoughtfulness and precision, particularly because…

Slow medical education borrows from other "slow" movements by offering a complementary orientation to medical education that emphasizes the value of slow and thoughtful reflection and interaction in medical education and clinical care. Such slow…
Output Formats

atom, dcmes-xml, json, omeka-xml, rss2