Health and Medical Humanities in Global Health: From the Anglocentric to the Anthropocene.

This chapter addresses three research questions. First, it asks, in what ways have the health and medical humanities been conceptually or practically connected with global health? The chapter provides a schematic history of the health and medical humanities to identify that the medical humanities have been, and continues to be, very much a “Western” Anglo-European project, but one that has always contained critiques of dominant paradigms in medicine and health. It then asks, how might the health and medical humanities meaningfully shift to become a global area of research and practice? It describes a recent World Universities Network Health Humanities Initiative, which brought scholars together from across the world to take a first step toward this goal, and emphasizes the key importance of open dialogue to support this shift. Finally, it asks, in what areas might the health and medical humanities be of fundamental benefit to global health into the future? It discusses the health humanities in health professions education and future development and describes a framework to plan and evaluate health humanities teaching. The chapter concludes by discussing the key importance of the humanities in tackling the health challenges of the future.