Medical humanities in the UK: a world trend in medical education today

Abstract

This editorial aims to present a critical analysis of the state-of-the-art literature on the initiative of introduction of the Medical Humanities into Medical Education in the United Kingdom,as well as the perceptions and attitudes of medical students, scholars and researchers in this field. For such purpose, a critical literature review was performed at the online bases Ovid-SP and Scopus for the keywords in the English language ‘medical humanities’, ‘medical education’, ‘humanities’, ‘humanisation’, ‘physicians’, ‘patients’, ‘medical students’, ‘British’, ‘England’, during the period from 2000 to 2011, also collecting publications by cross-referencing. This search produced a result of 34 papers, from which 29 were directly referenced in this work that shows the way through which the Medical Humanities became a flourishing discipline to be introduced in Medical Schools from the 1950’s on, simultaneously in the US and the UK. At this panorama, we historicised the origins of the dissolution process of the ‘good doctor’ and delineated the pathway by which the UK has become the focus of a worldwide trend in humanisation of the health care. As such, raising the world debate with the British both wide and effective experience of introduction of the Medical Humanities, firstly as an instrument for the ethical education in health, then, more recently, as a research strength to investigate the observed effects of the integrity in the education od doctors produced by its several formats implementation across the Medical Schools in the UK, after the publication of Tomorrow’s Doctors by the General Medical Council in 1995, whose main aim was to “rescue” the ‘good doctor’ back into the healthcare.