Embracing the unknown: introducing medical humanities into the undergraduate medical curriculum in India

Medical education fails to address the medical student's many questions, doubts and anxieties about his profession and his own relation to it. Students' growing disillusionment with the profession and increasing disconnect with the realities of the healthcare scene in India have reached critical levels, resulting in a general clamour for reform of the medical curriculum. Many look towards medical humanities for the answer to the problem. Referring to some of the available western thinking and practice of medical humanities (MH), this paper recommends the evolution of an indigenous model which will draw on the growing body of new scholarship on India in the humanities and the social sciences. Some guidelines are offered for starting an MH programme, stressing the need for a flexible and broad-based approach, and a participatory pedagogy focused on students' needs, that draws creatively on available resources. Rather than viewing the 'arts' as a discrete addition to our personalities, an MH programme needs to show us how to integrate the multiple facets of our personalities.