Accepting as a given that the humanities disciplines are not product or “results” driven, this paper argues that the core of an interdisciplinary field of medicine and humanities, or medical humanities, is an interpretive enterprise that is not readily open to quantitative assessment. A more humanistically oriented medical practice can derive, however, from the process that produces new insights and works toward the development of a new, mutually shared, and humanizing language.

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 in medical education; on the knowledge, skills, and values that are found in such a curriculum; and on who should teach medical humanities and make curriculum decisions regarding content and placement. I conclude with a call for a renewed interdisciplinarity in the medical humanities (...) and a move away from the territorial aspects of disciplinary knowledge and methods sometimes found in medical humanities practice. (shrink)