Although medical education focuses on absolutes, the black and white, the right versus wrong answers of multiple choice tests, in practice, medicine is the artful navigation of nuanced greys. To better prepare learners for the reality of clinical practice, the COM has offered a medical humanities program as part of the longitudinal curriculum for over a decade. Medical humanities includes the diverse fields of narrative medicine, visual arts, history, anthropology, and philosophy, providing additional tools through which to process illness and health with the aim of improving patient care and physician wellness.
The program strives to:
- Promote humanistic clinical care
- Provide learners with additional tools in which to process challenging clinical scenarios
- Develop comfort with ambiguity
- Create community around shared values
- Support scholarship in the humanities
Medical Student Opportunities:
- Narrative medicine courses at the UA Poetry Center during MS1
- Guest speaker lecture series
- Mentored research/scholarly projects in Narrative Medicine
- Student editor positions with our humanities and arts journal, Harmony Magazine
- Narrative and Diversity Book Club
- Collaboration with the medical humanities section at the Arizona Health Science Library
- Integration within the artistic community of Tucson and The University of Arizona