Alan Bleakley

Educating Doctors’ Senses Through the Medical Humanities: “How Do I Look?” uses the medical diagnostic method to identify a chronic symptom in medical culture: the unintentional production of insensibility through compulsory mis-education. This book identifies the symptom and its origins and offers an intervention: deliberate and planned education of sensibility through the introduction of medical humanities to the core undergraduate medicine and surgery curriculum. To change medical culture is an enormous challenge, and this book sets out how to do this by answering the following questions: How has a compulsory mis-education for insensibility developed in medical culture and medical education? How is sensibility capital generated, who ‘owns’ it and how is it distributed, mal-distributed and re-distributed? What is the place of resistance (or ‘dissensus’) in this process? How can the symptom of a ‘developed’ insensibility be addressed pedagogically through introduction of the medical humanities as core and integrated curriculum provision? How can both the identity constructions of doctors and doctor–patient relationships be tied up with education for sensibility? How can artists work with clinicians, through the medical humanities in medical education, to better educate sensibility? The book will be of interest to all medical educators and clinicians, including those health and social care professionals outside of medicine who work with doctors.

"How Do I Look?"

Educating Doctors' Senses Through The Medical Humanities

This ground-breaking book sets out a fresh vision for a future medical education by providing a radical reconceptualisation of the purposes of medical humanities through a lens of critical health psychology and liberatory pedagogy. The medical humanities are conceived as translational media through which reductive, instrumental biomedicine can be raised in quality, intensity, and complexity by embracing ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental values. This translation occurs through innovative use of metaphor. A note of caution is offered – that the medical humanities too can be instrumental and reductive if not framed well. Drawing on major theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière and bringing together insights from diverse but inter-related fields, Bleakley focuses on the "ills" of contemporary biomedicine and medical education, and the need for reconceptualisation, which – it is argued – the translational medical humanities have the potential to accomplish. Current instrumental approaches to medical humanities, embracing communication skills training and narrative-based medicine, have failed to address the chronic symptoms suffered by medicine. These include resort to closed, functional systems thinking rather than embracing dynamic, complex, open, and adaptive systems thinking; lack of democratic habits in medical culture, compromising patient safety and care; the production of insensibility rather than deepening of sensibility in medical education; a lack of attention to ethics, aesthetics, and politics where the instrumental is privileged; and a lack of critical reflexivity in revisioning habitual practices. Through persuasive argument, Bleakley sets out a more radical manifesto for the role the arts and humanities might play in medical/healthcare education and offers a new approach based on curriculum process rather than syllabus content, to recuperate aesthetic sensibilities, discernment, and affect in medicine. The book will appeal to medical and healthcare educators, medical and health humanities scholars, engaged clinicians, social scientists drawing on critical theory, and arts and humanities practitioners engaging with medical and healthcare themes.

Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics

Medical Humanities

Julie Browne

John Bligh

The purpose of medical education is to benefit patients by improving the work of doctors. Patient centeredness is a centuries old concept in medicine, but there is still a long way to go before medical education can truly be said to be patient centered. Ensuring the centrality of the patient is a particular challenge during medical education, when students are still forming an identity as trainee doctors, and conservative attitudes towards medicine and education are common amongst medical teachers, making it hard to bring about improvements. How can teachers, policy makers, researchers and doctors bring about lasting change that will restore the patient to the heart of medical education? The authors, experienced medical educators, explore the role of the patient in medical education in terms of identity, power and location. Using innovative political, philosophical, cultural and literary critical frameworks that have previously never been applied so consistently to the field, the authors provide a fundamental reconceptualisation of medical teaching and learning, with an emphasis upon learning at the bedside and in the clinic. They offer a wealth of practical and conceptual insights into the three-way relationship between patients, students and teachers, setting out a radical and exciting approach to a medical education for the future. “The authors provide us with a masterful reconceptualization of medical education that challenges traditional notions about teaching and learning. The book critiques current practices and offers new approaches to medical education based upon sociocultural research and theory. This thought provoking narrative advances the case for reform and is a must read for anyone involved in medical education.” - David M. Irby, PhD, Vice Dean for Education, University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine; and co-author of Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform of Medical School and Residency "This book is a truly visionary contribution to the Flexner centenary. It is compulsory reading for the medical educationalist with a serious concern for the future - and for the welfare of patients and learners in the here and now." Professor Tim Dornan, University of Manchester Medical School and Maastricht University Graduate School of Health Professions Education.

Identity, Power and Location

Medical Education for the Future

Alan Douglas Bleakley

The Medicine Wheel and Transpersonal Psychology

Fruits of the Moon Tree

Robert Marshall

Returning to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for inspiration, this book uses these epics as a medium through which we might think imaginatively about key issues in contemporary medicine and medical education. These issues include doctors as heroes, and the legacy of heroic medicine in an age of clinical teamwork, collaboration and a more feminine medicine. The authors challenge ingrained habits in medical education, such as the way we characteristically “train” medical students to communicate with patients and colleagues; the reduction of compassion to the “skill” of empathy; the rote recital of the medical history as a “song”; and the new vogue for “resilience” as response to increasing levels of stress and burnout in the profession. A Homeric lens also shows new ways of thinking about translation of medical lingo into patients’ understanding, the relatively high levels of anger and error shown in clinical interactions, and modern phenomena such as “whistleblowing” in the face of unacceptable error or misbehaviour. While exhaustion and burnout are becoming more common in medicine, the authors ask if a more lyrical, rather than epic and tragic stance, might benefit medical work. Drawing on a wealth of experience in the field, the book promotes a new kind of medicine and medical education fit for the 21st century, but envisages these through the ancient lens of Homer’s two epics. In the heroic glory elaborated in the Iliad and the themes of homecoming and hospitality set out in the Odyssey, Homer provides a narrative arc that is a blueprint of modern medicine’s development from a heroic endeavour to a contemporary collaborative provision of hospitality, where the hospital remains true to its name and doctors engage in work of care rather than “fighting” disease with the hospital as battleground.

Seeking Help from Homer

Rejuvenating Medical Education

Victoria Bates

Sam Goodman

In recent decades, both medical humanities and medical history have emerged as rich and varied sub-disciplines. Medicine, Health and the Arts is a collection of specially commissioned essays designed to bring together different approaches to these complex fields. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars, this volume embraces a breadth and range of methodological approaches to highlight not only developments in well-established areas of debate, but also newly emerging areas of investigation, new methodological approaches to the medical humanities and the value of the humanities in medical education. Divided into five sections, this text begins by offering an overview and analysis of the British and North American context. It then addresses in-depth the historical and contemporary relationship between visual art, literature and writing, performance and music. There are three chapters on each art form, which consider how history can illuminate current challenges and potential future directions. Each section contains an introductory overview, addressing broad themes and methodological concerns; a case study of the impact of medicine, health and well-being on an art form; and a case study of the impact of that art form on medicine, health and wellbeing. The underlining theme of the book is that the relationship between medicine, health and the arts can only be understood by examining the reciprocal relationship and processes of exchange between them. This volume promises to be a welcome and refreshing addition to the developing field of medical humanities. Both informative and thought provoking, it will be important reading for students, academics and practitioners in the medical humanities and arts in health, as well as health professionals, and all scholars and practitioners interested in the questions and debates surrounding medicine, health and the arts.

Approaches to the Medical Humanities

Medicine, Health and the Arts

This book critically analyses how politics and power affect the ways that medicine is taught and learned. Challenging society’s historic reluctance to connect the realm of politics to the realm of medicine, Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice: The Contradiction Cure emphasizes the need for medical students to engage with social justice issues, including global health crises resulting from the climate emergency, and the health implications of widening social inequality. Arguing for an increased focus on community-based learning, rather than acute care, this innovative text maps the territory of medicine’s contradictory engagement with politics as a springboard for creative curriculum design. It demonstrates why the socially disempowered - such as political and climate refugees, the homeless, or those without health insurance should be primary subjects of attention for medical students, while exploring how political engagement can be refined, sharp, cultivated and creative, engaging imagination and demanding innovation Exploring how the medical humanities can promote engagement with politics to improve medical education, this book is a ground-breaking and inspiring contribution. It is an essential read for all those with a focus on medical education and medical humanities, as well as medical and healthcare students with an interest in the social determinants of health.

The Contradiction Cure

Medical Education, Politics and Social Justice

Larry Lynch

Gregg Whelan

This book brings together an edited selection of presentations from the Association for Medical Humanities annual conference 2015, held at Dartington Hall, UK, that address the question: How might innovative performing arts help to develop medical education and practice? It includes papers and accounts of both keynote talks and performances, presenting cutting-edge activity, thinking and research in the medical and health humanities. The volume also offers an archive of a visual arts exhibition focused on surgical themes that ran in conjunction with the conference. An introductory chapter situates the conference in the context of Dartington Hall’s radical education tradition, while an overview chapter discusses the theme of ‘risk and regulation’ in contemporary culture, with particular reference to medicine and healthcare. Part I: Selected Keynotes covers three key areas in the conversation between medicine and the arts: ‘chance’ in health and illness; the contested role of simulation in art and medical education; and risks in introducing arts-based learning to medical students. Part II: Performances archives three innovative and challenging performance pieces presented at the conference, with commentaries and discussion, including a closely-argued philosophical justification for performance art. Part III: Histories offers a historical gaze on: anatomical illustration; plagues represented through art; and poetry written in combat. Part IV: For some, just living is a risk offers a photo-essay on Haiti’s symptoms; a photo-record on the regulation of foodways for those living at the edge of subsistence; a medical student’s wry account of scepticism towards the use of arts in medical education; and a photo-essay concerning the care of a child with complex disabilities and special needs. Part V: Exhibition ‘At the Sharp End of Bluntness’ archives deliberately provocative visual work addressing surgical themes and living with cystic fibrosis as ‘Slow Death’.

Dangerous Currents

Risk and Regulation at the Interface of Medicine and the Arts

Allan Peterkin

The ultimate enrichment and survival guide for Foundation Programme doctors, Staying Human During the Foundation Programme and Beyond provides time-tested advice and the latest information on every aspect of a junior doctor's life – from clinical transitions, to coping with stress, enhancing self-care and protecting personal and professional relationships. Already acknowledged in its original Canadian edition as an invaluable resource by thousands of doctors working across North America, this UK adaptation – with a host of new material and features – offers evidence-based practical advice to junior doctors on how to cope with a wide-range of challenges including working in teams, sleep deprivation, time pressures and ethical issues, while at the same time maintaining a high level of patient care and safety. The authors also address subjects such as sexuality, equality and social justice.

Alan Bleakley

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