Medical Students' attitude to the teaching of Medical Humanities

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. The teaching of medical humanities to medical students has internationally been regarded as valuable in contributing to a well-rounded medical education. Nevertheless, however valuable one believes the teaching of the medical humanities to be, unless the students perceive the teaching to be useful, relevant, important & interesting, it is unlikely that they will derive maximum clinical benefit from the experience. In this small study, 18 randomly selected first clinical year University College London Medical School students were exposed to humanities teaching during the afternoon session of their 9 days of the year spent in the community attached to a General Practitioners clinic. At the end of the year their views & impression of the teaching of poetry, philosophy of science, biomedical ethics, medical history, museum/art gallery visits & film was obtained. Overall, the students were very positive about their experience & rated all programme components very highly.