Working with colleagues here on campus who are interested in medical humanities, I've begun digging into the lay of the land in the US / UK. One surprising and troubling trend seems to be emerging.

If you peruse the contributors to state-of-the-field handbooks or webpages listing affiliate faculty of institutional programs, you would be forced to conclude that very few trained humanists are involved in shaping the medical humanities discussion.

And I know that this conclusion necessarily obscures the fact that humanists are doing groundbreaking and urgent work at the intersections of medicine, health, illness, disability, pharmacology, etc.

So what's the cause of this disjoint? How is it that a field putatively created to humanize our understanding of medicine as a mode of knowing the world has, for the most part, marginalized the very disciplines trained to do this kind of analysis?

One reason (I think) is that so many programs in medical/health humanities at academic institutions were created explicitly out of partnerships with medical institutions. And humanists are not typically the faculty most likely to seek out these kinds of partnerships

The goal of such programs as they currently exist, it seems, is not so much reshaping our understanding of medical knowledge via humanistic frameworks but rather the credentialing of practitioners or future practitioners in more human-oriented modes of medical practice.

For anyone looking to dig in to what's going on in such programs around the country, here's a good place to start: https://case.edu/medicine/bioethics/sites/case.edu.bioethics/files/2020-03/Health%20Humanities%20Report%202020.pdf

One thing I keep wondering is: what would a medical humanities program look like that insisted on its center of gravity within the humanities, and resisted becoming a credential factory w/ revenue potential in favor of being a site of critical & collaborative intervention?

I suppose an answer might be:

"Such a program would look underfunded."