Beyond “Dr. Feel-Good”: A Role for the Humanities in Medical Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although educators embrace the values that are nominally included in the idea of "the art and science of medicine," the arts and humanities have remained at the edges of medical education. One reason for this exile is the overwhelming emphasis in the curriculum on biomedical science over the social sciences and humanities. Other causes are self-inflicted-a frequent lack of theoretical rigor in the design of educational offerings and, more important, no clear answer to the question of how the humanities can make better physicians. A common justification for including the arts and humanities in medical education-that spending time with literature, music, and the visual arts contributes to student and faculty reflection and well-being-is compelling; however, it risks further marginalizing the field as a soft, feel-good supplement to training.In this Invited Commentary, the author proposes several unique ways in which the arts and humanities contribute to the development of physicians who practice with excellence, compassion, and justice.These ways include disrupting taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions; introducing a pause in perceiving, thinking, and acting; encouraging engagement with complexity and ambiguity; seeing past the surface to historical and societal influences and causes; and encouraging an awareness of the multiple, unique voices and perspectives of patients. Ultimately, the humanities prompt awareness of the space in which physicians care for human beings in their moments of greatest need and bear witness to fundamental changes in their patients and in themselves.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".