Medicine Needs the Humanities: Franciscan Spirituality as a Guide
Madeline Erwich, Duke Divinity School, Bernadette Ebri, Duke Divinity School, UNC School of Medicine, Chad Thompson, MD, Baylor University, and Brewer Eberly, MD, Family Physician, Fischer Clinic, McDonald Agape Fellow, Duke Divinity School
Medical training has been described by some to be “anti-intellectual”. Much of medical education involves rote memorization and regurgitation, part of which is essential to gaining the knowledge base to practice medicine. However, many trainees find that type of educational process to be deeply unfulfilling—even counter to the intellectual life. Properly understood, the intellectual life includes a posture of wonder, studiousness, and gratitude toward all things. Many medical school training programs look to the health humanities to recover the intellectual life and wonder of the medical trainee.
But this is not to say that mandatory curricula in the health humanities would have better outcomes. Many medical schools have begun to incorporate similar programs in response to the realization that this type of education is necessary and yet, lacking. We all know there is a role for the health humanities, just as there is a role for medical research, particularly in the formation and training of young clinicians. The question becomes how we might refocus the health humanities to center the intellectual task of medical training as the care of the patient.
Many have critiqued the world of health humanities for being insular and overly concerned with “feel-goodism” for clinicians, reducing transformation only to what the individual finds personally meaningful according to their own tastes and aesthetic preferences.
In this panel, we look to the prophetic and spiritual practices within the Christian community to push the health humanities toward the true intellectual life. Heschel writes, “The main task of prophetic thinking is to bring the world into divine focus...through God to the object" (Heschel 2025). Inspired by this vision, we look to the Franciscan spiritual tradition as a guide for bringing the world of the health humanities into divine focus. Within this tradition, St Clare of Assisi offers a model of prayer which offers an alternative approach to the health humanities: she invites us to gaze, consider, contemplate, and imitate. Attention particularly on the last two steps of this model might provide a helpful framework for a type of health humanities that provides prophetic witness not only to training clinicians, but to the very discipline of the health humanities itself.
For Clare, contemplation focuses on the possibility of God’s presence with us. Thus, the focus does not end in self-edification or self-discovery but rather in attention to one’s particular context and the needs that arise in that place. This is the work of letting ourselves be changed by what we have heard, read, or seen. The final step of imitation involves an embodied practice of imaging God, pulling us out of ourselves to respond to the patients we serve. Eric Howell describes this final step as a call “to become who we are called to be in Christ in and for this place and time.” (Howell 2025)” It is the call of the beautiful not merely to praise what we find worthy but to be changed by it and moved to action on behalf of the communities to whom we are called.
This panel will gather physicians, artists, and medical students for conversation and reflection around their pursuit of prophetic witness within the health humanities, asking, “What is beauty for?” How do the health humanities actually change our clinical practices? How does aesthetics drive and reshape our ethics? What are the dangers in such connections? How might we bring the patient into divine focus?
References
Abraham Joshua Herschel. 1962. The Prophets: An Introduction. Harper & Row Publishers.
Eric Howell. 2025. Under the Francis Tree. Smyth & Helwys Publishing.
But this is not to say that mandatory curricula in the health humanities would have better outcomes. Many medical schools have begun to incorporate similar programs in response to the realization that this type of education is necessary and yet, lacking. We all know there is a role for the health humanities, just as there is a role for medical research, particularly in the formation and training of young clinicians. The question becomes how we might refocus the health humanities to center the intellectual task of medical training as the care of the patient.
Many have critiqued the world of health humanities for being insular and overly concerned with “feel-goodism” for clinicians, reducing transformation only to what the individual finds personally meaningful according to their own tastes and aesthetic preferences.
In this panel, we look to the prophetic and spiritual practices within the Christian community to push the health humanities toward the true intellectual life. Heschel writes, “The main task of prophetic thinking is to bring the world into divine focus...through God to the object" (Heschel 2025). Inspired by this vision, we look to the Franciscan spiritual tradition as a guide for bringing the world of the health humanities into divine focus. Within this tradition, St Clare of Assisi offers a model of prayer which offers an alternative approach to the health humanities: she invites us to gaze, consider, contemplate, and imitate. Attention particularly on the last two steps of this model might provide a helpful framework for a type of health humanities that provides prophetic witness not only to training clinicians, but to the very discipline of the health humanities itself.
For Clare, contemplation focuses on the possibility of God’s presence with us. Thus, the focus does not end in self-edification or self-discovery but rather in attention to one’s particular context and the needs that arise in that place. This is the work of letting ourselves be changed by what we have heard, read, or seen. The final step of imitation involves an embodied practice of imaging God, pulling us out of ourselves to respond to the patients we serve. Eric Howell describes this final step as a call “to become who we are called to be in Christ in and for this place and time.” (Howell 2025)” It is the call of the beautiful not merely to praise what we find worthy but to be changed by it and moved to action on behalf of the communities to whom we are called.
This panel will gather physicians, artists, and medical students for conversation and reflection around their pursuit of prophetic witness within the health humanities, asking, “What is beauty for?” How do the health humanities actually change our clinical practices? How does aesthetics drive and reshape our ethics? What are the dangers in such connections? How might we bring the patient into divine focus?
References
Abraham Joshua Herschel. 1962. The Prophets: An Introduction. Harper & Row Publishers.
Eric Howell. 2025. Under the Francis Tree. Smyth & Helwys Publishing.