Across town on the Charles River Campus, Anthony Petro<\/a> shares Sarfaty\u2019s conviction that the humanities can improve healthcare. An associate professor of religion, he wants to send Sarfaty more students who\u2014like herself\u2014explored the richness of the humanities during their pre-med, undergraduate years. In July 2020, Petro founded the BU Health Humanities Project, an initiative that aims to bring together students and faculty from the health sciences and the humanities<\/a> and highlight the many beneficial connections between their fields. He\u2019s undertaking the work as part of his three-year term as BU\u2019s National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor.<\/p>\n So far, the project has organized a series of discussions on topics like domestic violence in Muslim communities and race and COVID-19 and awarded fellowships to CAS undergraduates pursuing health humanities research. The project also acts as a resource, connecting students with the many classes BU offers at the intersection of humanities and health<\/a>, from Sociology of Mental Illness to Death and Immortality.<\/p>\n Medicine is a human<\/em> discipline. Some of my students think of physicians as scientists. But for the most part, physicians are not just doing science, they\u2019re dealing with humans.<\/p>\n In December 2020, the American Association of Medical Colleges published a report titled The Fundamental Role of the Arts and Humanities in Medical Education<\/em><\/a>. The report urges medical schools to integrate the arts and humanities into their curricula, both because practicing medicine requires \u201ca deep understanding of the human condition\u201d and because interaction with the arts and humanities can enhance physicians\u2019 well-being and keep burnout at bay.<\/p>\n \u201cMedicine is a human<\/em> discipline,\u201d says Petro. \u201cSome of my students think of physicians as scientists. But for the most part, physicians are not just doing science, they\u2019re dealing with humans.\u201d The more aspects of human diversity that future healthcare providers can immerse themselves in, he says, the better off they\u2014and their patients\u2014will be.<\/p>\n Petro is the author of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion<\/em><\/a> (Oxford University Press, 2015) and teaches one of the Department of Religion\u2019s most popular courses, Religion, Health, and Medicine<\/a>. The class always attracts pre-med students, Petro says, and many have never considered the ways religious beliefs have shaped\u2014and continue to shape\u2014US health policies and practices. When HIV\/AIDS appeared among gay men in the 1980s, for example, research funding was initially withheld because many considered homosexuality a sin and believed the crisis needed a moral solution, not a medical one. And current debates around abortion and end-of-life care hinge on the question of when life begins and ends\u2014a question that, say, a priest may answer differently than a doctor.<\/p>\n Petro\u2019s class also explores the types of conditions that are deemed worthy of medical attention and the behaviors that are considered \u201cnormal\u201d or \u201chealthy\u201d and how those standards emerged. The American Psychiatric Association, he says, stopped labeling homosexuality a mental disorder only after social attitudes around sexuality shifted. It\u2019s a history Petro believes future healthcare providers should know. \u201cIf every person who is becoming a physician understood something about the history of medicine\u2014and how tethered that history has been to histories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism, and how it continues to reproduce those things\u2014I think it would better equip them to understand the context they\u2019re entering into,\u201d he says, and help them to avoid repeating the errors of the past.<\/p>\n The idea that not everyone defines health or healing in the same way is also a topic of discussion in Lance Laird\u2019s medical anthropology courses. Laird is a scholar of Islam and the assistant director of BU\u2019s master\u2019s program in medical anthropology and cross-cultural practices<\/a>. The program\u2019s website<\/a> points out that Boston is home not only to several major teaching hospitals but also to Vietnamese monk shamans, Chinese herbalist-acupuncturists, Haitian voodoo priestesses, African American root doctors, and Pentecostal faith healers. Studying anthropology and culture, says Laird, a MED assistant professor of family medicine, gives medical providers greater understanding of and respect for these many healing traditions.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a biomedical clinician, you are practicing a particular form of traditional medicine,\u201d he says, \u201cbut your patients may be turning to people who are practicing other forms of healing that are just as important to them.\u201d And working with\u2014rather than against\u2014a patient\u2019s culture often leads to more effective care.<\/p>\n Modern doctors can also learn from studying the medical traditions of ancient cultures, says James Uden, an associate professor of classical studies<\/a> who teaches a class on the history of medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome. \u201cStudying the ancient world is all about sharpening your capacity for empathy with others,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have to put yourself in the lives of people who come from a very different world and have completely different assumptions. You have to reconstruct all of their values. That\u2019s great training, I think, for healthcare providers.\u201d<\/p>\n Studying ancient medicine also tends to generate humility, Uden says. \u201cWe have a tendency to think ourselves at the top of the mountain and to believe everything that\u2019s happened in history just leads up to us. But, actually, when you study history, you see that people throughout time have thought they were right about everything and then have been proved wrong.\u201d Studying the misunderstandings of the past\u2014long-standing beliefs that illness resulted from a wandering uterus or from an imbalance of bodily fluids\u2014reminds us to be wary of certainty and open to the possibility of new discoveries, he says.<\/p>\n For emergency room doctor Elizabeth Mitchell<\/a>, immersing herself in the humanities has many benefits. They teach her to be comfortable with ambiguity. \u201cA lot of medicine is not clear cut, black and white,\u201d says Mitchell, a MED clinical professor of emergency medicine. \u201cThat\u2019s hard for us in medicine. We want an answer. We want a diagnosis. We want a treatment plan. But in my practice in emergency medicine, so many interactions that I have with patients are unfinished and unclear. I think that spending time with poetry, music, art, and literature allows you to become more comfortable with the gray areas.\u201d<\/p>\n Mitchell shares poetry with her students and residents during daily rounds, and she pens essays and poetry herself. In spring 2020, her poem \u201cThe Apocalypse,\u201d about the anxieties of battling the emerging coronavirus pandemic, appeared in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>. In 2018, the Annals of Emergency Medicine<\/em> published \u201c15 Rounds,\u201d Mitchell\u2019s poem about treating a gunshot victim<\/a> and then sending him back to the same dangerous streets.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes, I\u2019ll have a really tough case, and I\u2019ll just come home and write about it,\u201d Mitchell says. \u201cThat is super therapeutic for me. It allows me to process what I saw. And then if I can turn it into something\u2014a story or a finished poem\u2014that somehow takes the experience and makes it less painful for me.\u201d<\/p>\n A recent guest lecturer in Petro\u2019s class talked about the immense pressures on today\u2019s physicians to contribute more to the bottom line while still offering quality care\u2014and the need for personal outlets to escape those burdens. Exposing future healthcare providers to the humanities, says Petro, expands the archive of interests they can explore to nurture their own health and happiness, as well as those of their patients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" BU Health Humanities Project looks at how studying poetry, history, and religion can help doctors better connect with patients\u2014and reduce their own stress<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":57828,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57976,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/57049\/revisions\/57976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=57049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Understanding and Respect<\/h2>\n
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Medicine\u2019s Gray Areas<\/h2>\n