Medical Humanities (HM) relates to, but is not identical with, the art of medicine, for whichnowdays we often use the word “doctoring”. Doctoring requires communication skills, empathy, self-awareness,judgment, professionalism, and mastering the social and cultural context of personhood, illness, and healthcare.MH has been characterized as a field of study that helps doctors do what they are already doing in a more humane,empathic way: it is to do with making better doctors not with re-revisioning medicine itself, and there arehistorical and political reasons why the field has taken this path. Both sides of medicine –the biomedical and thehuman- can be united if a shared approach is used to improve our understanding of human health and wellbeingby calling on multiple perspectives biomedical, philosophical, historical, artistic, literary, and anthropologicaland sociological. Te result of this approach should be a more insightful view of the patient, the doctor and thehealth care system, and an enhanced capacity to cure, relieve and comfort.

Medical Humanities (HM) relates to, but is not identical with, the art of medicine, for whichnowdays we often use the word “doctoring”. Doctoring requires communication skills, empathy, self-awareness,judgment, professionalism, and mastering the social and cultural context of personhood, illness, and healthcare.MH has been characterized as a field of study that helps doctors do what they are already doing in a more humane,empathic way: it is to do with making better doctors not with re-revisioning medicine itself, and there arehistorical and political reasons why the field has taken this path. Both sides of medicine –the biomedical and thehuman- can be united if a shared approach is used to improve our understanding of human health and wellbeingby calling on multiple perspectives biomedical, philosophical, historical, artistic, literary, and anthropologicaland sociological. Te result of this approach should be a more insightful view of the patient, the doctor and thehealth care system, and an enhanced capacity to cure, relieve and comfort.