AN OVERVIEW OF AN ELECTIVE COURSE ON MEDICAL HUMANITIES
AN OVERVIEW OF AN ELECTIVE COURSE ON MEDICAL HUMANITIES

Summary/Abstract: We still lack a tradition of courses on medical humanities designed for medical students, though medical schools in the United States or Western Europe included such courses in their academic curricula more than half a century ago. Such courses have proven their effectiveness in the training of a future doctor, providing them with better abilities to communicate, observe and develop empathy towards the patient. This paper wants to address the problem of the need to deliver such courses that would be even more welcome if all the interdisciplinary topics would gather to give their worthy opinion and perspective on the problem of medical humanities. Such an attempt is still far from being accomplished; therefore, the paper is going to present an attempt to develop an elective course devoted to the topic of medical humanities. With foreign language teachers in charge, such a course could only offer a limited perspective, using fiction as a tool to deal with the students’ cultural training, development of communication skills and understanding of the role of storytelling in medicine. The paper is going to present some examples that can be used in such an elective course on medical humanities in order to reach the above-mentioned goals.

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