I'm running into this problem in the health humanities (medical humanities) literature, where the historical precedence for these perspectives in medical schools has mostly been to humanize the profession.
The argument (again historical) is that, "if we teach students the history of medicine, and have them reflect on art in medicine, they will be better doctors."
The problem is twofold: first, the *value* of humanistic inquiry in this context is pedagogical not epistemic. We're here to teach some stuff, but our discourses don't overlap with the medical sciences. So there's an imbalance in the hierarchy of knowledge work. "Health humanists don't do *real* research . . ." and so on. So there's a lot of posturing in the articles I've read that seem to need to justify the discipline's right to exist.
Second, all of this builds into a weirdly essentializing argument: health humanists study Humanity and health. Like the capital 'H' humanity of humanism gets lobbed around more than I'm comfortable with.
So leaning back on the "we teach doctors to be human" and that our work is about The Human seems a useful approach, but it is a position that leaves the discipline on a weak footing.
I say this for two reasons: first, I do not know if you can *humanize* medicine. (Using 'medicine' here because the 'health' in health humanities is useful designation that expands the field beyond medical humanities.) Would the doctors behind the Tuskegee syphilis study have stopped if they were given a history of medicine class? Would the doctors stealing organs from the bodies of children in the Alder Hey scandal not done this because they took a bioethics class? Medicine has larger ethical problems that are epistemic and ontological which the medical and health humanities cannot address if their job is to bandage the open wound that is the medical sciences.
Medicine cannot be humanized. (At least in the context of why the medical humanities should exist.)
#medicalhumanities #healthhumanities
I say this to lead to my second reason. There is a bigger question about what the *value* of the humanities? (This kind of question assumes a capitalistic value generation relationship, but I can't address that here.)
What the discourse about Humanity avoids is the discussion of method, and the messy, subjective work that starts to emerge when anyone has to do humanistic work. We shouldn't read novels with health topics to "humanize ourselves" but instead use those novels to teach us how to interpret representation, follow the ideological underpinnings of their argument, and understand our our subjectivity. (This could be any humanistic subject. I use novels as a short hand.)
My second reason that this impetus to "humanize" is a problem is that the labor involved in "humanizing" (whatever the fuck that means) is very different than teaching humanities, and that the former undermines the latter's discursive, ideological, and social potential.
More simply, the answer to why the health humanities (or medical humanities) should exist is not "to make more ethical doctors"; instead, it is because humanists use of subjectivity undermines the harmful assumptions which undergird biomedical epistemics. (I use biomedical because 'health' is a bit too broad, and I have my own bone to pick.)
#medicalhumanities #healthhumanities
Sean Purcell (he/him)