Skip Main Navigation outline goes here The Lancet, Volume 373,
Issue 9679, Pages 1940 - 1941, 6 June 2009
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61055-2Cite or Link Using DOI  The
dangerous practice of empathy  Jane Macnaughton aEmail Address
An important role for the medical humanities is to stimulate
imaginative insight into the lives and experience of others
through literature and other art forms. The idea is that such
exposure will develop “empathy” as an attribute useful in
clinical practice. Those interested in medical humanities have
promoted the importance of this concept, and the “practice of
empathy” has become an icon of the growing medical humanities
movement in the USA and the UK. US physicians have even gone so
far as to adopt empathy as one of the accredited “skills”
required by the American Council for Graduate Education.
However, another crucial role of the medical humanities is to
provide a critical watching brief on the way in which medicine
can highjack complex ideas, confining and defining them in its