In this collection of essays, the authors don t argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism in medicine. Instead, they ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession 's beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted (or not) in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse.

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications (e.g. Journal of the American Medical Association, New England Journal of Medicine, Academic Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, The Lancet) during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. It features urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges (representing the nation's 126 accredited medical schools and nearly 400 major teaching hospitals), the American Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. addressed professionalism with such titles as Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism, Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation, or Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations (note the preoccupation with assessment). Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing (attributes of professionalism), describing (activities that may foster it), decrying (the environment that works against it), and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don't argue with these attributes. specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label professional or professionalism. This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession's beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted (or not) in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment.

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice.
In "Health Humanities Reader," editors Tess Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. Friedman have assembled fifty-four leading scholars, educators, artists, and clinicians to survey the rich body of work that has already emerged from the field--and to imagine fresh approaches to the health humanities in these original essays. The collection's contributors reflect the extraordinary diversity of the field, including scholars from the disciplines of disability studies, history, literature, nursing, religion, narrative medicine, philosophy, bioethics, medicine, and the social sciences.
With warmth and humor, critical acumen and ethical insight, "Health Humanities Reader" truly humanizes the field of medicine. Its accessible language and broad scope offers something for everyone from the experienced medical professional to a reader interested in health and illness.

In their desire to improve medical professionalism within the world of academic medicine, editors Delese Wear and Janet Bickel have assembled thirteen thought provoking essays that elucidate the many facets of teaching, valuing, and maintaining medical professionalism in the middle of the myriad challenges facing medicine at the dawn of the twenty-first century.The collection traces how the values of altruism and service influence not only mission statements and admission policies but also the content of medical school ethics courses, student-led task forces, and mentoring programs, along with larger environmental issues in medical schools and the communities they serve.