UC Medical Humanities Consortium

Throughout history, doctors have distinguished themselves among healthcare providers by referencing special skills and accredited knowledge about the body and disease. Over centuries, increased rigor in educational standards and licensing have crafted the professional identity of physicians, establishing a privileged status in the healthcare hierarchy. This essay provides an overview of how the medical profession has defined itself over time, and it examines how policing professional boundaries has discriminated against and marginalized competitors in the marketplace for medical services.

Developments in computing and electrical engineering which ushered in the field of cybernetics in the twentieth century raised moral and ethical concerns about how humans perceive machines to possess intelligence, autonomy, and authority. The biggest challenge that each generation has confronted is not machines that truly think, but that humans were willing to treat them as if they do. The ethical dilemma, as philosophers and critics have warned, is not that machines will assume moral agency, but that humans will relinquish their own. The history of artificial intelligence therefore tells us less about the rise of machine minds than about our willingness to redefine intelligence in the image of our inventions. To understand the ethical stakes of AI in education and society today, we must first understand this deeper pattern: that the most consequential transformation may not be in our machines, but in ourselves.

Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out invites readers to consider what caregivers and medical professionals may learn from poetry by patients. It offers reflections on poetry as a particularly apt vehicle for articulating the often isolating experiences of pain, fatigue, changed life rhythms, altered self-understanding, embarrassment, resistance, and acceptance.

Intriguing parallels arise between contemporary end of life images and themes expressed historically in the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, the Catholic saint who is known as the “Little Flower.” Drawing on her combined experiences as a professor of the humanities at Rice University, and as an Artist In Residence in Palliative, Rehabilitation, and Integrative Medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, the author examines topics such as the paradoxical grandeur of small things, the spiritual significance of flowers, compassion and consolation in the wake of human suffering, the power of mystical dreams and prophetic visions, and vibrant conceptions of eternal life. Ultimately, Saint Thérèse’s “little way” and contemporary end of life imagery emphasize the knowledge of the heart, which teaches how to see the hidden in everyday life, and how to recognize the dedication of love.

This volume provides a transcript of the meetings on Racism and Race: The Use of Race in Medicine and Implications for Health Equity. The colloquia brought together scholars and experts who differ in their perspectives on how race has been understood and how it could, or should, be addressed in medicine; they questioned how we might do this in a way that achieves the best for our patients and the communities we serve. Sponsored by UCSF’s School of Medicine.