[On bedside medical humanities]

This article presents a challenge which we call "the humane gap in medicine" and also raises some ideas on how to meet this challenge. This is the gap between the capacities of biomedicine as a bureaucratic and scientific establishment and the medical needs and expectations of its beneficiaries. It is argued that successful medicine relies on two pillars. The first is the corpus of biomedical knowledge, while the other is knowing the patients within their bio-psycho-social life-world. Both the second pillar and the bridging of the two pillars are dependent on the Humanities. The humanities in medicine also provide healthcare professionals with means of support against devastating encounters with suffering, disability or the relentless pressures of academic careers and overwhelming physical labor. The humanities serve as a shared platform for all healthcare providers, diminishing traditional, and sometimes obstructive, boundaries such as those that may exist between doctors and nurses. We provide a list of possible benefits that the Humanities may bring to clinical practice and medical education. We conclude with some suggestions on how the humanities may be incorporated into medical education and implemented at the bedside. We suggest that art students attend anatomical labs; courses in medical humanities be opened for the benefit of all students, within the faculty of medicine and beyond. We encourage students from every faculty to undertake academic activities which will combine voluntary work with the sick with participatory observation in the tradition of cultural anthropology.