Placing the humanities perspective in the health professional curriculum

Most health professional education consists of three separate stages: a general background that provides a humanities perspective, a core of basic science or theory courses, and lengthy clinical experiences. Challenges to this strict compartmentalization and sequencing have led to limited humanities and social sciences training for health professional students. A constant struggle for time allocation occurs between preclinical and clinical faculty. What place can be found in an already crowded curriculum for a humanities perspective, especially when this perspective has supposedly been addressed at an earlier stage in each student's education? This article proposes that a humanities perspective is one of three distinct themes of a professional's education (along with theory and practice) and also the necessary cultural context out of which the professional judges him- or herself. The importance of the humanities perspective is such that the present sequenced pattern should be reconsidered and more attention given to the integration of the three major educational themes throughout students' training.