William Rodney Herring

[X-posted at Blogging Pedagogy. I'm pasting here for reasons my comment should make clear.]

Some of you may have seen the article At Some Medical Schools, Humanities Join the Curriculum in Monday's New York Times.

Prompted by the fact that

Three years ago, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine began an art-appreciation course for medical students, joining a growing number of medical schools [like "Yale, Stanford Cornell and a few other medical schools"] that are adding humanities to the usual forced march of physiology, pathology and microbiology

this article documents several students' experience in and (potential) use of a visit to the Met.

Perpetually riddled with status anxiety about our role in the university, should we view such an "addition" as validation? as promising? as (well-deserved or -needed) promotion?

I suppose I read this "news" differently. As though it's almost not news.

Quickly, it becomes clear that the use-value of humanities is precisely that they provide another skill or techne, a way of seeing "the art of looking" as instrumental "to the practice of medicine" because "at least one study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001, has found that looking at painting and sculpture can improve medical students' observational abilities."

Now it shouldn't surprise us that the humanities are being instrumentalized, even if some romantic disciplinary hope wants to hold out against such instrumentalization (in order to set, say, English against, say, business majors). And even if there's something suspicious in the Bloomian hope for an ethic of learning for learning's sake, there's (equally) something supremely characteristic about our mode of production in the instrumentalization of everything, in the subordination of all "means" to other "ends."

Which is why I say it shouldn't surprise us that the work of humanities, too, is being made into a means to another end. (In our capitalist mode of production, all work must be seen as separate from its product, a view inevitably consequent from the mode that alienates the worker from the product of h/er work.) And so it is only a matter of time before the real purpose (or value) of the addition of liberal arts courses to the medical school curriculum surfaces: Such an addition

could also, wrote Dr. Irwin Braverman, a Yale medical professor and an author of the [JAMA] study, eventually help apply some salve to that long suppurating wound, health-care costs. "With heightened observational skills," he wrote, "physicians can often ask the questions necessary to make correct diagnoses without relying too much on costly blood tests and X-rays."