Many medical schools are now re-introducing the humanities (philosophy, literature, creative writing, medical history) with the aim of broadening the education of doctors. This book attempts to show how the humanities can extend the scope of bioethics beyond regulation, and how they can affect the attitudes of doctors towards patients and the perceptions of medicine, health and disease which have become part of contemporary culture.
The book rattles the medical cage by offering a critique of certain aspects of medical practice and research. For example, the idea that patient status or the doctor/patient relationship can be understood via quantitative scales is shown both to rest on a misunderstanding of numbers, and to create a distorted perception of human beings. The book offers an alternative way of understanding the qualitative research producing this distortion, an understanding akin to the sort we acquire from good literature. Again, much medical ethics would have us believe that doctors, unlike plumbers, teachers and the rest of us, are uniquely beneficent, indeed altruistic. This professional delusion diverts us from the real ethical achievements and problems of medicine. The central aim of this book is to expose the half-truths of contemporary medicine and to celebrate the Greek belief that Apollo was god of both medicine and the arts.
The Authors
Professor R.S. Downie is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University and Professorial Research Fellow. He has specialised in applying philosophical techniques to practical problems. In particular, he is interested in biomedical ethics and in the use of literature and the arts as vehicles for developing medical perceptions and attitudes.
Dr Jane Macnaughton is the Director of the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine and Clinical Senior Lecturer in the School for Health at the University of Durham. She is a qualified GP and has a PhD in philosophy. Her main interests are in literature and medicine, philosophy and history of medicine and in the applications of the humanities to medical education. |