Ethics and the Arts in the Medical Humanities

Abstract

In this chapter I query what art is ‘for’ in the medical humanities. I outline the benefits expected to arise from the use of art—which in practice has almost exclusively referred to the fine arts and to creative writing—in pedagogy and practice, and suggest Martha Nussbaum’s model of literature and ethics as a philosophical framework that articulates how these benefits occur. I then provide several critiques of Nussbaum, notably those prompted by critical and postmodern scholarship, which identify both the literature she prefers and the audience response she anticipates to it, as expressive of middle class Western cultural hegemony. I then examine approaches to ethics and the arts within postmodern scholarship, and identify its own normative aesthetic and epistemological preferences, values and stances. I conclude by offering a strengthened rationale and approach to the creative arts in the context of the medical humanities, one which values the interrelationship of formalist with intuitive, and of clinical with theoretical approaches to art.