The advent of integration as a feature of contemporary medical curricula can be seen as an advantage for the medical humanities in that it provides a clear implementation strategy for the inclusion of medical humanities content and/or perspectives, while also making its relevance to medical education more apparent. This paper discusses an example of integration of humanities content into a graduate medical course, raises questions about the desirability of an exclusively integrated approach, and argues for the value of retaining a (...) discrete and coherent disciplinary presence for the medical humanities in medical curricula. (shrink)

Medical educators recognize the value of reflection for medical students and the role creative writing can play in fostering this. However, direct creative writing tasks can be challenging for many students, particularly those with limited experience in the arts and humanities. An alternative strategy is to utilize an indirect approach, engaging students with structured tasks that obliquely encourage reflection. This paper reports one such approach. We refer to this approach as in-verse reflection, playing on both the structure of the writing (...) and its novel approach to reflection. Students were invited to write, in verse-like structures, about their personal and clinical experiences as medical students. Thematic analysis of their creative outputs and reactions identified four principal themes: the challenges of life as a medical student, the emotional demands of the medical course, a sense of connectedness and solidarity with fellow students, and a sense of marginality within the hospital system. Students generally found the tasks highly engaging and conducive to reflection, producing texts representing significant insights into their experiences as medical students. The reported method offers a relatively simple, structured, and guided approach to reflective writing, adding to the repertoire of methods available to educators in the medical humanities. (shrink)

This text looks at the early correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, revealing the emotions and intimate exchanges that occurred between them. The perspectives presented here are very different from the view related by Abelard in his History of My Calamities, an account which provoked a much more famous exchange of letters between Heloise and Abelard after they had both entered religious life. Offering a full translation of the love letters along with a copy of the actual Latin text, the authors (...) provide an in-depth analysis of the debate concerning the authenticity of the letters and look at the way in which the relationship between Heloise and Abelard has been perceived over the centuries. They also explore the political, literary, and religious contexts in which the two figures conducted their affair, and offer new insights into Heloise as an astonishingly gifted writer, whose literary gifts were ultimately frustrated by the course of her relationship with her teacher. (shrink)