Introduction

This section introduces the medical humanities and its emergence as part of the so-called new humanities. It argues that as an idea and as a field, the medical humanities has a long pre-history, dating back to the early nineteenth century and even, one might argue, to the origins of Western medicine itself. The chapter glosses the various understandings of medical humanities as a term and as a field, including its scope and practice. It addresses the benefits of medical humanities in medical education, glossies the emergence of terms such as the ‘health humanities’ and the ‘critical medical humanities’, and argues that the relationship between medicine, the life sciences and the humanities is reciprocal, and that the medical humanities as a discipline is not ‘in service or in opposition to the clinical and life sciences’ but rather that it is ‘productively entangled with a “biomedical culture”’, as Viney, Callard and Woods have argued. Finally, the chapter delineates the scope and range of the current volume.