as
published in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, CMAJ, February 23, 2015.
We are publishing very brief excerpts from this
recently published book review below. To
access the full article (pay for view) visit CMAJ website at http://www.cmaj.ca/content/early/2015/02/17/cmaj.140532
Book
review
A Place for Humanities in Medical
Education
by Vincent Hanlon M.D.
Cheryl L. McLean, editor
Brush Education, 2014
Cheryl L. McLean, an independent scholar
and publisher of The InternationalJournal of the Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, has arranged this resource book in four
sections covering education for empathy, practitioner self-care, use of
narratives and use of the creative arts to create change in health.
Given the acceptance of a scientific
basis for the education of physicians and current reliance on reproducible
numeric evidence, much of the medical
humanities discussion occurs on the margins of the medical education
enterprise. In her recent keynote address
at the 2014 Alberta PsychiatricAssociation meeting, McLean posed a central question in the debate over
efforts to include medical humanities in medical education: How do the creative arts help practitioners
enhance clinical and relational skills?
The amply credentialed contributors to Creative Arts in Humane Medicine physicians, medical students,
allied health professionals and artists provide some answers but raise yet more
questions. (such as) How do we reconcile
first person experiences of illness and death with the objective reductionism
of disease that is more typical of biotechnology in medicine? This perspective
contrasts with a common perception among medical educators of humanities role
as hand-maiden, usually pleading to contribute to the serious enterprise of
educating doctors.
An underlying question remains
unanswered: What would be the best
forums in which to engage in such interdisciplinary inquiry?
Dr. Rita Charon has advocated
identifying "senior influential clinicians as key players in the
integration of the arts with the science of medicine. These clinicians are individuals who themselves
have been exposed to and altered...by deep learning in humanities and narrative
studies."
Their teaching methods reflect this
learning and enable them to foster an invigorating, long-term and necessary
interdisciplinary collaboration on clinical teaching that can include and
welcome senior artists and teachers from the humanities. Gifted voices from both medicine and humanities
have contributed to Creative Arts in Humane Medicine in McLean's ensemble effort to show us different paths to
the future.
