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Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice. In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field—and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection's contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences. With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, Health Humanities Reader truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.

Professionalism in Medicine: Critical Perspectives casts a careful, and at times wary, eye on a dominant force in contemporary academic medicine that appears to have been accepted as an absolute good. Calls for developing, increasing, or maintaining professionalism—not to mention the current obsession with evaluating or assessing it—appear with regularity in medical journals and conference programs of all stripes. The resultant literature has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes and behaviors subsumed under the label'professional'or''professionalism'(Wear & Kuczewski, 2004). Moreover, the fixation with assessment has become a new steering mechanism that is reductionistic when it shapes the total range of possible and thinkable dimensions of professionalism. The richness, complexity, and contradictions of professionalism in medicine are being flattened into categorical attitudes or behaviors that evaluators (whose professionalism is rarely assessed) can check. As Mark Kuczewski, one of the contributors to this volume, observes,'Valuing and evaluating professionalism seem to have become equated.'This preoccupation with assessment is not indigenous to medical education. It is arising and taking hold of many institutions as new principles—indeed, mandates—of scrutiny and examination become acceptable, if not desirable, cultural practices. In their incisive work on audit cultures in higher education. Shore and Wright (2000) argue that coercive practices of accountability sometimes sound eerily like moves toward'exhibiting'professionalism whereby'every individual is made acutely aware that [his] conduct and performance is under constant scrutiny'(p. 77).

Triple Takes on Curricular Worlds is a groundbreaking exploration of curriculum studies that offers a new understanding of the'selves'educators bring to work. Three educators from three different disciplines write on issues not usually forefronted in curriculum studies: boundaries, disgrace, distance, fear, forgiveness, light, and mothers. Their gendered voices give new meaning to the idea of curriculum to include that which courses through their lives in the classroom, in the public sphere, and in their nighttime personas. Each writer demonstrates to what extent teaching must interact with living in the twenty-first century.Writing from the perspectives of medicine, elementary education, and literature, the authors examine what it is like to live and work in a multidisciplined, multilayered world. Their chapters, born out of their life experiences, critique the serious issues of our time—terrorism, technology, power, and privilege—hoping to stimulate readers to think about their own public and private selves.

The thirteen essays in Educating for Professionalism examine the often conflicting ethical, social, emotional, and intellectual messages that medical institutions send to students about what it means to be a doctor. Because this disconnection between what medical educators profess and what students experience is partly to blame for the current crisis in medical professionalism, the authors offer timely, reflective analyses of the work and opportunities facing medical education if doctors are to win public trust. In their drive to improve medical professionalism within the world of academic medicine, editors Delese Wear and Janet Bickel have assembled thought-provoking essays that elucidate the many facets of teaching, valuing, and maintaining medical professionalism in the middle of the myriad challenges facing medicine at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The collection traces how the values of altruism and service can influence not only mission statements and admission policies but also the content of medical school ethics courses, student-led task forces, and mentoring programs, along with larger environmental issues in medical schools and the communities they serve. Contributors: Stanley Joel Reiser Jack Coulehan Peter C. Williams Frederic W. Hafferty Richard Martinez Judith Andre Jake Foglio Howard Brody Sheila Woods Sue Fosson Lois Margaret Nora Mary Anne C. Johnston Tana A. Grady-Weliky Cynthia N. Kettyle Edward M. Hundert Norma E. Wagoner Frederick A. Miller William D. Mellon Howard Waitzkin Donald Wasylenki Niall Byrne Barbara McRobb Edward J. Eckenfels Lucy Wolf Tuton Claudia H. Siegel Timothy B. Campbell