ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the medical humanities as a field of knowledge and its establishment as a theoretical and methodological body in its own right, especially in medical education. Historically speaking, medical humanities emerged alongside the development of the field of social sciences in health, with several crossover points between the two. Through study of the literature we delimited the two fields of knowledge in relation to study scope, interests and interaction. In medical education although there is no consensus on which subjects compose the area of medical humanities, the task is to develop ethical and relational competence in students for good medical practice. Of the many difficulties, we highlight the distancing between experiences of teaching humanistic themes and medical practice. The essay concludes with the idea that humanistic education should emerge from medical practice. There is a lack of medicine in the medical humanities, mainly due to a shortage of teachers capable of achieving the interdisciplinary quality that constitutes the field.
Humanization of Health Practices; Medical Education; Social Sciences; Humanities; Medicine