Engaged humanities: moral work in the precincts of medicine

The medical humanities emerged in the late 1960s in response to shared concerns among a group of hospital chaplains, academic clinicians, and moral theologians and philosophers about the growing power of a technological imperative and a perceived trend toward depersonalization in medicine. Gathering themselves originally under the rubric of "health and human values," these reformers launched a new field of intellectual work and practice reminiscent of the revival of liberal learning spawned by the Renaissance humanists, who endeavored to link humanistic ideals to professional practice in the workaday world of their time. The task of appropriating and adapting the studia humanitatis to our time and circumstances is crucial to defining the evolving identity of the medical humanities field.