The Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Durham
The researchers at the Centre will address the problem by looking at whether society's expectations of medicine and healthcare are right and justifiable, rather than focussing on the real or imagined failings of medicine. Such research will include consideration of whether wider questions about how we live our lives and bring up our children are really the domain of medicine, and whether we can live meaningful lives without health, beauty, youth and longevity.
The Strategic Award will, for the first time, enable a full-time, critical mass of dedicated cross-disciplinary researchers drawn from the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences, to investigate the relationship between medicine and human 'flourishing'.
The team will also explore new research methods, including ways in which ideas and insights from the humanities can be brought to bear on the methods of science, and what substantive questions in scientific enquiry can be generated or influenced by the humanities and social sciences.
Key research areas
Researchers at the Centre aim to pull together widely diverse strands of research from many different fields under a single over-arching enquiry: where does medicine belong, as a source of human flourishing, amidst a wide range of other sources of flourishing?
Other sources include community, kinship, roles and relationships, intimacy, identity and purposefulness, creativity, imagination and a sense of wonder, as well as a sense of place and context.
Evidence indicates that the less we draw on these other sources, the more we focus on and are anxious about our bodily shortcomings and imperfections, somatise problems, and engage in health-seeking behaviour. People in communities where there is a strong sense of identity and belonging, on the other hand, rely less on medicine and the health services.
The team are focussing their research on the idea flourishing, as opposed to wellbeing, because the latter suggests a pleasant feeling of comfort in mind and body, in the present moment. Flourishing, on the other hand, suggests the direction in which our lives are going and the important things we want to achieve. It allows for the idea of growth and development, which involve struggle and discomfort. Flourishing indicates a meaningful and satisfying life, rather than one that is happy and healthy all the time.
Key achievements
Research projects at the Centre include a multi-sector workforce development programme in the arts and health, led by Mike White, who spearheaded the Angel of the North project by Antony Gormley. Collaborations with a number of primary care trusts in the northeast, are focussing on community and emotional health and social prescribing - which involves enriching people's lives and health by widening the range of social opportunities open to them, rather than offering medical interventions.
Other research strands are exploring intimacy and the inter-body nature of the doctor-patient relationship, the relationship between assumptions about obesity and health (and the social policy recommendations they give rise to), and the literal and cultural aspects of schizophrenia and auditory and verbal hallucinations.
The sense of wonder as a source of flourishing, the therapeutic effect of music, the danger of viewing empathy as something that can be measured and the virtues and duties of patients as well as doctors are also coming under the microscope of the Centre.
In addition, the team will be playing a major role in a university-wide investigation of the nature and aspects of beauty, and evaluating the impact of The Lion’s Face, a Wellcome-Trust funded opera about the experience of Alzheimer's disease, as a way of enhancing public understanding of a condition.
Work to date has produced several Lancet editorials and continued the team's involvement in a series of edited volumes, 'The Medical Humanities Companion', published by Radcliffe Medical Press, the second of which was published in 2010.
During 2010, the Centre's strategic management will be identifying and drawing out four or five key research clusters, as part of the over-arching enquiry into medicine's role in the context of other sources of human flourishing. The next step will be to turn those enquiries into new funding bids with national and international collaborators to expand the research programme.
References
Marmot M, Status Syndrome: How your social standing directly affects your health and life expectancy, London: Bloomsbury, 2004
Porter R, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present, London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997
Greaves D, The Healing Tradition: Reviving the soul of Western medicine, Oxford: Radcliffe, 2004