From Atoms, Molecules, and Numbers to Literature, Art, and Performance

I argue that the humanities have an important role in pharmacy education. I came to this view after believing the humanities to be useless and superfluous when I was in pharmacy school and during the earlier phases of my career. I eventually learned that the humanities can teach us a lot that the biomedical sciences can not, and that the humanities can expand on a lot of what the biomedical sciences do teach us. My argument derives from a model that makes a distinction between the disease and illness components of health problems, which makes it possible to see how biomedical sciences focus on disease and how the humanities focus on illness. Because medical schools have adopted the humanities into their education and training programs, I also argue that pharmacists will need a similar grounding if they are to collaborate with physicians on the same terms.