Teaching public health humanities: innovations from the field

This article offers a comprehensive definition and illustration of the field of public health humanities. Ranging across the disciplines and educational settings of seven different scholar-educators, it offers a clear and detailed discussion of this often-overlooked branch of the wider health humanities, with a focus on teaching. Public health humanities brings the theories, methods and resources of arts and humanities disciplines into conversation with the core activities and frameworks associated with public health. This means that approaches from fields including literature studies, creative writing, history and philosophy engage with concepts including the social and structural determinants of health, health equity, health promotion, epidemiology and risk, surveillance and screening, disaster management and social medicine. Public health humanities focuses humanistic inquiry on the systems and structures that impact health, the values and challenges of population-based approaches, and the interconnectedness of illness and health with environments, ecologies, and large-scale social, economic and political factors. We introduce the shared themes that unite our case studies and then go on to describe seven different approaches to teaching public health humanities, across a variety of contexts from undergraduate arts programmes to specialist training in public health. We offer seven individual accounts with concrete examples to illustrate the models and methods taught, in the hope that these will assist and inspire others. Useful frameworks of wide applicability include a socioecological model of health inequity and an 'iceberg model': a metaphor for analysing what lies below the surface for specific learners.