Humanism and Medicine: a forced misunderstanding?

Abstract

We frequently see the terms medicine and humanism mixed up in different versions and meanings: "humanizing medicine", "humanities in medicine", "more human medicine" or "humanized medicine", among many others. However, although they have textual similarities, I believe that the proposal underlying most of these approaches is confusing, at best, or clearly wrong, as it pretends to teach the humanities for the practice of medicine. In this essay I want to show that there is an idea of humanism that is naturally intrinsic and indissoluble with the practice of medicine, whose praxis must be understood as a "pedagogy of healing". For this, I will show in a first part the definitions of the ontological categories, then I will try to define humanism from what it has been historically and what it is not, in a pragmatic sense, to finally demonstrate the confluence of medicine and humanism in a proposal that must recognize communication as the interpretation of "the human being-patient".

Keywords

• humanism
• teaching
• history of medicine