Transforming Undergraduate Global Health Education Through a Humanities-Focused Curriculum

Abstract

Global health needs the humanities today as medicine needed the humanities in the 1970s. When new biomedical technologies threatened to undermine the physician in their primary role of healing the patient, the field of medical humanities emerged to rehumanize the doctor and revive physician empathy through humanities methods and content such as close reading of poetry and novels, reflective writing, and critiquing art. In contrast, many of today’s undergraduate global health students are plagued by a surfeit, rather than a lack, of empathy to “save the world.” As the medical humanities transformed medical education, can today’s humanities and arts, especially the new fields of health humanities and critical medical humanities, transform global health education and practice by igniting a “global health humanities”? This essay focuses on emerging pedagogical and curricular challenges in nonclinical, undergraduate global health training primarily in North America.