Exploring the Medical Humanities
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Claire Hooker is the coordinator of the medical humanities program at the University of Sydney. She studied at the University of Sydney, where she researched Australian women scientists for her PhD, but since then has become more and more interested in various aspects of public health - especially how people think about and respond to health risks. Her current project is about how lay people conceptualise cancer risk (and the answers turn out to be pretty fascinating!)
Sometimes it can be hard to see the human in the scientist. The dominant image
we have of scientists is the proverbial white coat – and it, in turn, is a
symbol for one of the ideals that guides science, which is that knowledge is
objective. Scientific knowledge is powerful precisely because it makes the best
attempt we humans have yet come up with for being objective – in other words,
not having one’s race or creed or sex or personal feelings or early childhood
experience or cultural values influence the nature of knowledge.
And yet scientists are very much human beings – in fact, often their human
characteristics seem slightly exaggerated and more obvious, perhaps even
extreme. Scientists are often very funny people, even if their jokes are a bit
nerdy and rely on specialist knowledge. (I like this one: ‘what are you if you
are not part of the solution? - A precipitate!’) They are obsessive and
egocentric. In my experience, they often retain something of that incandescent
passion of childhood, where things are breathtakingly beautiful or
mind-meltingly exciting. As I kept hearing time and again when researching the
history of women scientists in Australia, they don’t suffer fools gladly.
It seems appropriate to me to stop and think about the humaness of scientists
from time to time. Certainly scholars in what is known variously as ‘science and
technology studies (STS)’ or ‘history and philosophy of science (HPS)’ever since
Thomas Kuhn have expended considerable effort and paper in debating how the
social aspects of science – its hierarchies, its rituals, rules and practices,
its organisation, its cultural imaginations – have influenced the development of
scientific ideas. But for me this doesn’t ever really explore the more
intangible, personal human aspects of what being a scientist is all about – how
creativity occurs, what patience in following a hypothesis really feels like,
what the long hours of rhythmic laborious tasks opens up in the reflective head.
It was these fleeting experiences that I was most drawn to when I was
researching women scientists.
Because of my research, I had the great privilege of talking to many women
scientists (and their male colleagues) and reading the letters and papers and
notes and comments of a great deal more. The questions I kept wanting to ask
were not ‘which was this person’s most important discovery’ or ‘how upset were
you about not getting equal pay’, but instead something like ‘what was it about
those nematodes that was so interesting to you - that kept you wading through
mud hour after hour in search of fish that might be a host?’ Or, ‘did you have
your good ideas in conversations with people or by yourself at home or where?’
Or, ‘what is it about that formula that feels ‘elegant’ to you?’ Or, ‘how did
you feel when you found that fossil bed above the Old Ordovician layers outside
Yass?’ (Although, I think I had pretty good idea about the answer to that one!)
Capturing these little, human moments really seemed as compelling and important
as listing what these women had published, or the positions they’d held.
One of the great pleasures of this sort of history is in having the time to just
be a witness – to pause long enough to really appreciate these unique individual
lives, to witness, to celebrate or commiserate. Australia has produced numerous
terrific scientists of both sexes, and when you get to know the details of their
work, you realise just what extraordinary people so many of them were. But this
history was not just indulgent since paying attention to the person in the
scientist is rather unavoidable if you are going to write about women.
Historically, it has been easy to pretend that men’s lives were only what their
public selves revealed.\ Many biographies of (male) scientists discuss their
personal lives only as a sort of addendum to the ‘real’ story, with very little
detail. Women scientists in contrast cannot exist wholly in the professional
domain given that some had family and personal commitments that placed limits on
their professional work, and others found their careers not progressing along
quite the expected path. Despite the assurance of their male colleagues that it
was their work, not their sex, that mattered, they found their time taken up in
countless little departmental ‘housekeeping’ tasks.
Now that my book on women scientists – a group of people, by the way, who very
rarely felt they encountered discrimination, even if as a group their
experiences were constrained by their sex – is done and out, I’ve been turning
my attention more and more to health and medicine. And yet the themes and
thoughts from the experience of these women scientists have stayed with me. I am
now in a new job where, to my satisfaction, these themes can become front and
centre concerns, not unscholarly sidelines of interest. I am now coordinating
the graduate program in Medical Humanities at the University of Sydney, where
exploring humaness is what it is all about.
Medical Humanities is a fast growing area internationally. It emerged from
medical schools concerned about ensuring that their graduates are as well
prepared to professionally manage the human qualities of their patients in a
compassionate, empathetic and morally appropriate way, as they are to do a
brilliant job technically. Medical Humanities also saw its rise from the growing
numbers of physicians who double as writers, musicians, or film makers, not to
mention the scholars in history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literature
and fine arts who have turned their attention to matters medical. In North
America and in a few places in the UK, there are increasing numbers of medical
humanities programs, for the most part within medical education programs. In
Australia, the medical humanities program at the University of Sydney is unique.
Because it began in the Faculty of Arts, the program exists outside the graduate
medical program, though it provides classes and resources to medical educators.
(Of course, all Australian medical schools teach communication and professional
physician behaviour. While some have incorporated a few classes on medical
history or literature, there is no formal program anywhere other than at the
University of Sydney.)
The medical humanities program offers postgraduate degrees to students from all
backgrounds, though the majority of students are mid- or late-career health
professionals. Students take a core unit of study, ‘Key Concepts in Medical
Humanities’, and can then choose from electives both within medical humanities (eg,
medicine and war, medicine and music, medicine and museums, dignity), and across
the university, depending on their particular interests. Students love both the
program and the opportunity to just go and explore. Classes are very lively,
with students typically giving 110% and bringing extra material for their
classmates. The most common complaint with the course is that it has to end!
For me, medical humanities is an exciting area because it allows me, often
through my students, to explore a huge range of human experience. My students
have brought me with them in subjects as disparate as the shamanistic origins of
traditional Chinese medicine, the ways in which narrative competence (e.g.
listening to and telling stories) can improve clinical practice, how carers feel
about art on hospital walls, how it is to experience synaesthesia, under what
conditions have the notion of clinical trials developed historically. I am lucky
enough to admire the increasing volume of fiction, poetry, music and painting
that so many highly talented physicians and nurses produce. It’s a good time to
be doing this, because medical humanities is increasingly attracting support and
interest from funding bodies. A generous donation through the Harold and
Gwynneth Harris Fund (which honours the parents of the physician Dr Rhonda
Soricelli, who worked hard to allow her to go to medical school – a theme with
which many women scientists of an older generation would identify) has led us to
plan an annual Medical Humanities Fellowship. This fellowship gives a health
worker the chance to take three or four weeks out of the punishing schedules and
pressures of clinical life to conduct their own project in the creative or
scholarly arts.
As I write this, it strikes me that there ought to be a ‘scientific humanities’
programme, in addition to medical humanities, or at least that my program ought
to serve the needs of scientists as well. Even if scientists do not work with
patients, they still bear the responsibility of considering the social
implications of their research (on nuclear physics or recombinant DNA as two
examples). In addition, scientists, like doctors, are often immensely talented
people who have ‘second lives’ as artists or historians, and like doctors, are
either passionately committed to social service (to peace movements, for
example), or appreciate having the time to consider the social aspects of their
profession. The pleasures and depth of medical humanities may mean as much to
men and women scientists alike.
(And then we have only to open the sciences to professionals in the arts, a much
more demanding though equally satisfying task!)