For our fourth event, we had an inspiring conversation with Dr Lauren Barron, who is DeBakey Chair for Medical Humanities, Clinical Professor, and Director of the Medical Humanities Program at Baylor University. We don’t have the space to summarise all the stimulating insights Lauren shared with us, but the conversation is available to listen to as a podcast.

We do want to share some of the key messages we took away around the role of arts and humanities in medicine, how stories provide orientation to the delivery of care, and why humility is crucial in the interdisciplinary space of medical humanities.

Arts and humanities in medicine

Lauren spoke with us about the Medical Humanities Program at Baylor, which is one of the first undergraduate programs in the United States that offers students a foundation in both the sciences and humanities before they move onto medical school and other health professional programs. We started the conversation reflecting about the meaning of medicine from a holistic perspective.

Lauren explained that medicine is an exclusionary term for some – a term which only includes certain stakeholders and excludes many others. As a clinician, she warned that we should not equate medicine to “what doctors do”. Instead, Lauren advocated an understanding of medicine that takes a more holistic perspective on who and what is involved in the delivery and support of healthcare. Such a holistic understanding of medicine is particularly powerful in the interdisciplinary space of medical humanities, for it suggests that researchers in arts and humanities can be genuine stakeholders in medicine – rather than perennial outsiders.

Of course, the contributions of arts and humanities researchers to medicine are different than those of doctors, nurses, or physiotherapists. Evidently, people hold these roles by virtue of specialised sets of scientific knowledge and technological know-how which are fundamentally important to the delivery of healthcare. We also cannot overstate the importance of science and technology when we celebrate the tremendous progress of medicine in the 20th and 21st century. Yet, Lauren warned that we should not reduce medicine to a narrowly scientific and technological dimension, but highlighted that arts and humanities make a fundamental contribution to medicine in their own right.

This point goes right to the heart of some of our conversations with other guests in the series. Researchers in arts and humanities and medical professionals bring a very different set of specialised skills to the table. We know that policy makers and public opinion do not always value these different sets of specialised skills in the same way. Indeed, the aims and methods of arts and humanities are often negatively pitted against the knowledge and know-how of STEM. Seeing medicine as a holistic practice, where stakeholders with different skillsets meet, and where arts and humanities can play a central role, allows us to challenge this misconception.

The wisdom of stories

For Lauren, engaging with arts and humanities has practical value in her work as a physician. This is why her ground-breaking work in medical education is rooted in the belief that future health professionals need more than basic science courses. In this respect, arts and humanities are a toolbox which complement training in STEM and offer tools that students need for their future careers as health professionals.

One such tool is an understanding of narrative. Lauren shared several powerful stories about the power of stories in her clinical practice. We cannot do justice to the richness of these accounts here, so we really recommend that you tune into the podcast. We were particularly struck by Lauren’s reflection on the orientational role of Scripture during a very challenging consultation. Lauren explained how she felt paralysed at first and did not know how to proceed and provide appropriate care to a prisoner with very complex needs – until she remembered a parable from the Bible.

We’re certain that Lauren’s reflection will resonate with listeners irrespective of what role religion and spirituality has in their lives – and that is in part because both her account and the parable are stories which provide us with entry points for connection. Here, we can also start to see some of the contributions that researchers in arts and humanities can offer to the holistic project of medicine. Understanding the power of stories – knowing how they work, and how we can use them as tools – is part of the specialised skillset cultivated in arts and humanities programmes.

Perhaps we could therefore say that arts and humanities can complement the knowledge and know-how of science and technology with a sense of wisdom. This is not to say that researchers working in arts and humanities have a privileged access to wisdom. Rather, the aims and methods of arts and humanities offer ways for medical professionals to find tools that provide orientation in complex situations of care.

Humility and interdisciplinary connection

Finally, we talked about the role of humility in the interdisciplinary space of medical humanities and holistic understanding of medicine. A recurrent theme in our conversations is that various stakeholders – whether from arts and humanities or medicine and STEM – feel like “imposters” in this space. The mutual acknowledgement of such “imposter syndrome” may well be a first step toward meaningful connection, because it may break down initial lines of defence between people with very different specialised skillsets. When meeting in an interdisciplinary space, we can often feel intimated by the disciplinary specialisms of others, whilst forgetting that they too may feel the same about us.

Yet, acknowledging vulnerability shouldn’t mean owning up to being an “imposter”. Instead, it is more useful to talk about the virtue of humility in an interdisciplinary space. We should acknowledge the limits of our disciplinary specialisms in order to have meaningful interaction, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of denying the value of that specialised skillset altogether. Humility therefore does not equal self-doubt, but simply acknowledging the limits of what we know. We consider this a key virtue in the holistic ideal of medicine which Lauren shared with us.

Listen to the podcast

We recommend you have a listen to our podcast to hear the full story.

If you have any further questions or comments, do contact us at aestheticsandhealth@kent.ac.uk.

Dieter and Ian