The Human Condition:
Utah's New Medical Humanities Major
Robert Carson
F
or Jim Tabery, the connection between biology and philosophy wasn’t an abstract academic exercise—it was a lived reality. As an undergraduate in the 1990s, Tabery majored in both disciplines. Even then, he sensed “the deep connections between scientific inquiry and humanistic understanding,” though there was little infrastructure for a student to explore these connections in a systematic way.
Today, as a professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the university’s Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities, Tabery advances the interdisciplinary vision that will launch the University of Utah’s new Medical Humanities major in fall 2025. His own scholarship, examining the ethics of genetic research and DNA’s role in criminal justice, demonstrates the deep connections of medical and philosophical questions in modern public life.
The new major demonstrates the need for the Humanities in every profession
Medical humanities and humanistic medicine
According to Tabery, the concept of the medical humanities is less an adaptation of the humanities to pre-professionalism, than a reassertion of the humanities’ authority on pivotal questions of life and death. From the ancient Greek theories of the four bodily “humors” and their corresponding temperaments, to contemporary bioethical inquiry into genetic engineering, the humanities have always been central to our understanding of embodied life. What constitutes the good life? How do we reconcile ideals of human autonomy and dependency? In making decisions about suffering and healing, what powers are given to expertise over intuition?
Likewise, the practice of medicine and medical research demand humanistic inquiry. “If you think of health care as humans giving care to humans, you need to think of the humans in that equation,” explained Gretchen Case, director of the U’s Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities (CHeEtAH), when presenting the major to the Academic Senate in December 2024. Case has championed this program alongside Tabery.
Medical professionals need the interpretive skills to read complex human situations, the ethical reasoning to navigate difficult decisions, and the capacity for empathy with radically different kinds of human experiences.
These are precisely the competencies that humanities education cultivates through close reading, critical analysis, and rigorous scrutiny of meaning and value in human culture.
Humanities knowledge, skills, and ethos
The new Medical Humanities major organizes its curriculum around four core areas, each addressing essential dimensions of health care’s human dimensions. Arts and Letters explores the rich literary and artistic archives that illuminate medical thought and experience. Culture and Communication examines human behavior as it relates to medical questions, developing nuanced communication skills essential in both patient care and research. Ethics and Epistemology encompasses the philosophical foundations of medical practice and inquiry, while Gender, Ethnicity, and Disability Studies tracks the social dimensions of medical issues, examining how identity and inequality shape health outcomes.
Together, these areas provide what Tabery identifies as the knowledge, skills, and ethos appropriate to the major. The curriculum ensures that no student can earn a degree by sticking closely to one discipline. Instead, students “must engage across multiple humanistic approaches.”
“If you think of health care as humans giving care to humans, you need to think of the humans in that equation.”
From Minor to Major
The major emerges from years of groundwork. The medical humanities minor was a collaborative effort including Tabery, Stuart Culver, Kim Kaphingst, and philosophy chairs, Matt Haber and Eric Hutton. At the same time, Case’s Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities has been fostering connections between medicine and the humanities at the U since 1989. With philosophers Natalia Washington, Margaret Battin, and Madison Kilbride, Tabery and Case all together formed the committee to develop the major.
The proposal has earned extraordinary campus support. “If anything, people are asking why we’re just now doing this,” Tabery notes. “Why didn’t we do this 10 years ago?” The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences’ Health, Society & Policy program has provided crucial backing, and dozens of faculty across campus are prepared to teach courses for the major. The Department of Philosophy’s expanded advising team, including Connie Corbett and Lex Putnam, are helping students navigate the new major across different U divisions.
Mike Middleton, associate dean of academic affairs in the College of Humanities, emphasizes the major’s natural evolution from the successful interdisciplinary work by the committee
Utah has a unique opportunity in a desert of Medical Humanities programs. Map depicts states with highest (blue) and lowest (white) quantity of existing Medical Humanities programs.
and CHeEtAH: “Given student interest and positive collaborations across multiple colleges, it matured to the level that will support a major.” The role of the College of Humanities has been to support the “awesome work” of Tabery, Case, and their collaborators.
A Model For the Intermountain West
Looking ahead, the program fills a significant regional gap. Currently, medical humanities majors are regionally concentrated at institutions like Harvard, Brown, and the University of Chicago. The Intermountain West has been, in Tabery’s words, “a desert” in this field.
In her external review, Sarah Berry, co-president of the Health Humanities Consortium, affirmed Utah’s position to make nationally distinctive contributions. The program’s unique focus on arts and humanities disciplines—with both BA and BS degree options—would make it only the seventh program nationally to offer this flexibility and the only one in the Mountain West and West Coast regions combined.
Tabery and Case hope to recruit 35–50 majors per year, serving not only pre-health students but also those interested in medical communication, journalism, research, and social work. As Case notes from her extensive experience teaching in medical schools, humanities backgrounds are valued highly in medical school programs, because they indicate students’ capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and adaptability.
Wanda Pillow, dean of the College of Humanities, emphasizes the value of humanistic inquiry. “The underlying value of an education in the humanities is the ability to think critically, to synthesize ideas, and to apply that knowledge in ways responsive to culture and context and with deep understanding of the past and present,” she says. “These skills and habits of mind are precisely what drive the success of our students and alumni and contribute to the U’s nationally respected programs. Nowhere is this more critical than in a program like medical humanities.”
The major also represents a powerful counter-narrative to concerns about liberal arts programs. By illuminating the fundamentally human dimensions of health, illness, and care, the U’s new major in medical humanities demonstrates an even larger truth: the need for the humanities in every profession.
Colleges, schools, centers, and programs across University of Utah campus supporting Medical Humanities.