Charting Change in Health Humanities Education: A Longitudinal Scoping Review

Our research team conducted a large-scale literature review of health humanities teaching publications to track the evolution of its methods, trends, and hints on where we might be headed. After decades of piecemeal integration, the health humanities now appear to be evolving at a dizzying pace. Catalyzing H.E.A.L. (Humanities Education and Anticolonial Learning) Medicine is a scoping review of 432 peer-reviewed articles that specifically address the inclusion of humanities and arts methods and methodologies in the education and professionalization of healthcare workers. We included peer-reviewed articles in global contexts, published in English and French, and spanning the timeframe of 1970 to 2022. This paper reports on 11 key categories of assessment. Results show a growing shift in instructor leadership from medical to humanities backgrounds, a wider variety in arts methods and collaborating disciplines, and an increase in intrinsic values as pedagogical aims. While language-based arts and university classrooms remain dominant, non-linguistic arts methods and alternative learning spaces are on the rise. The increased diversity in aims, collaborating disciplines, and evaluation methods points to a more interdisciplinary and social justice-oriented future. We hope that our data will shed valuable light on where the medical humanities have been and what may be on the horizon.