One of the sentences that stayed with me from the article "Repair those Rifts - Why Integrating Health Humanities into the medical curriculum is vital," which appeared in the Education Plus supplement of the Hindu on December 1, 2025, is: "Education is not just about ticking check boxes." As teachers and students, we have observed the tendency to do things merely for the sake of doing them, without any deeper significance or reflection. This resonated strongly with the line from Thrushes by Ted Hughes – ‘his act worships itself’. The authors recommend Paulo Freire's practice of ‘critical consciousness’, which helps us understand the nuances of real, everyday experiences—the way life is felt, endured, and understood in practice, not just in theory. They advocate for integrating the humanities into medical practice. Humanities departments study illness as a cultural narrative, whereas observation, clinical empathy, and communication are components of healthcare education. Malcom Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers highlights the importance of a patient’s backstory in doctor-patient communication. This aligns with "narrative medicine," where a story aids diagnosis and treatment. Understanding the backstory fosters empathy and more effective, holistic care.
Three examples are given to show that academic courses are being offered in the West based on these concepts. The first is Columbia University’s narrative medicine training, which focuses on listening beyond symptoms. The Stanford course pairs literature and bioethics to examine autonomy and justice. (Dr. Paul Kalanithi, author of When Breath Becomes Air, was a physician, writer and neurosurgery resident at Stanford University—King's College London, blending philosophy and history to debate resource allocation and end-of-life care. In India, the Medical Council introduced electives in Health Humanities. The National Medical Commission included Attitude, Ethics and Communication (AETCOM) in the curriculum. There is a need to integrate humanist socio-cultural and economic inquiry into the medical curriculum, which remains a distant dream. The authors propose a five-point framework to achieve this. (Check the poster)
The coursework for these academic programmes will involve rigorous, experiential learning and will be reinforced through fieldwork, outcome reviews, and work with advocacy groups, with patient voices at the centre. This will equip healthcare professionals and academicians to join global conversations linking medicine, anthropology, ethics, technology and democratised access to healthcare. Only by integrating humanities and medical science can India develop clinicians who not only treat diseases but also combat discrimination and mend the divides between science and society, technology and humanity.
References and further reading:
https://allpoetry.com/Thrushes
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
https://sps.columbia.edu/academics/masters/narrative-medicine/master-science/curriculum-courses
https://med.stanford.edu/bioethics.html
Gladwell, Malcolm. Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know. Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-taught/courses/philosophy-of-medicine-and-psychiatry-ma
Mahajan, Rajiv, and Tejinder Singh. Humanities in Medical Education. Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers, 2018.
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. Basic Books, 1988.
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