Development of the medical humanities program at East Carolina University

The medical humanities program at East Carolina University School of Medicine has 50 contact hours with medical students in the required curriculum, fourth-year electives that are well-subscribed (47% of the members of the class of 1989 took one or more), and programs for residents, fellows, and faculty. The author discusses several crucial decisions made in the first year of the program (1978-79) that affected the nature and development of the program: first, to begin the medical humanities courses in the preclinical required curriculum and use these courses as a base to build on in the clinical years; second, to develop a program through all years of training while preserving time for faculty research; third, to arrange for program faculty to team-teach with clinical faculty; fourth, to show the importance of the humanities programs and courses by the way in which they were constructed and situated in the curriculum; and fifth, to seek primarily to teach a method of inquiry.