We have adopted the Pitt Center for Bioethics and Health Law description of health humanities:

 

The health humanities (also known as the medical humanities) is "an interdisciplinary field of humanities, social science, and the arts and their application to healthcare education and practice. 'The humanities and arts provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to each other. They also offer a historical perspective on healthcare… [and help] to develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection — skills that are essential for humane healthcare. The social sciences help us to understand how bioscience and medicine take place within cultural and social contexts and how culture interacts with the individual experience of illness.' With these aims, in 1997, Center faculty developed the School of Medicine’s Area of Concentration in Medical Humanities for medical students." (Paraphrased by LITMED, the leading medical humanities database founded in 1993.) 

​

This site will enable us to give undergraduate students pursuing careers in medicine and other health-related fields a sense of the role of the Humanities as undertaking a narrative, interpretive, critical, and analytical understanding of what it means to be human.