Global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. To arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. But there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

This issue of Medical Humanities signals a turning point for an area of scholarship that is made up of several ‘contested and fragmented fields’ (p. 17) and has been criticised for lacking a central theory, method or politics. At first glance, there may seem to be little in common between recognisable ‘medical humanities’ scholarship—typically engaging with illness experiences, patient–clinicia...

As medical curriculum continues to experience a renaissance into the twenty first century, there comes to birth a variety of seeded programmes in which there is no concrete definition for what is termed humanities in medicine. However, while the humanities continues to play an integral role in medicine, alongside the publication of numerous articles published by medical journals, medical instit...

As befits an emerging field of enquiry, there is on-going discussion about the scope, role and future of the medical humanities. One relatively recent contribution to this debate proposes a differentiation of the field into two distinct terrains, 'medical humanities' and 'health humanities,' and calls for a supersession of the former by the latter. In this paper, we revisit the conceptual under...

In response to changes in health care, American medical schools are transforming their curricula to cultivate empathy, promote professionalism, and increase cultural competency. Many scholars argue that an infusion of the humanities in premedical and medical training may help achieve these ends. This study analyzes Web-based messaging of Ohio's undergraduate institutions to assess premedical ad...