Research Article
Integrating humanities into undergraduate medical curricula: A narrative review exploring focus areas, pedagogical design, and evaluation strategies
Background: Humanistic medical education is crucial, yet its implementation faces challenges due to inconsistent curricular focus, pedagogical approaches, and assessment methods. This review aims to identify key focus areas, effective pedagogical strategies, and robust evaluation methods for integrating the humanities into undergraduate medical education.
Methods: A narrative review of MEDLINE publications from 2014 to 2024 was conducted, followed by a qualitative synthesis.
Results: The initial search in MEDLINE identified 16 potentially relevant articles. After comprehensively reviewing the initial catchment through several analytical phases, 10 articles were considered for the final review. In addition, another 7 articles were included through citation tracking. Key focus areas identified in the review included medical ethics, cultural competency, literature and narrative medicine, compassion, bias in healthcare and social and behavioural sciences. Humanities were typically found to be integrated as electives, with student-centred teaching methods demonstrating effectiveness. While humanistic outcomes are highly valued, the strategies used to assess them remain notably complex and underdeveloped.
Conclusions: This narrative review emphasises the need for standardised approaches to medical humanities, curriculum design, pedagogy, and assessment.
Copyright and license ©Indian Journal of Medical Ethics 2026: Open Access and Distributed under the Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits only non-commercial and non-modified sharing in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
The introductory paragraphs of this paper reminded me of a pen portrait written by DVG, the acclaimed Kannada savant, of his personal physician, Dr. Gundanna. Here’s a translation of one of its passages:
“Gundanna knew only too well the troubles of the world. His exposure to literature helped him interpret internal nuances of people around him. At the time of establishing a medical college in Bangalore he stressed on one point that he considered was significant at the time: “Professors in medical colleges have to be well-acquainted with literature in addition to being good medical practitioners themselves. It’s worthless for a person to hold a degree in medicine without familiarizing oneself with literature up until the level of B.A., at the very least. Anyone without exposure to literature will find it tough to apprehend human tendencies. At the same time they will also be devoid of sufficient vocabulary which is essential to effectively teach medical sciences. A subject like medicine is often full of technical jargon. A certain proficiency in regional languages is expected from the professors, if the subject has to be taught with unambiguity. Proficiency in regional languages can be earned through study of literature. Traits of human behavioral extremes are also tenaciously understood through literature. You should therefore propound the need for medical professors to have a brief exposure to literature” He had told me this. I did follow his suggestions, only for it to end up being ignored by the grace of people in power.”
Full piece here: https://prekshaa.in/article/dr-gundanna-part-2