Abstract:

Many international medical schools offer medical history courses as a humanities component as a pleasant diversion from the hard sciences, as a means of creating educational depth and preparation for good citizenship, or to develop writing, communication and critical / analytical thinking skills. Medical history, however, has another serious role to play in research and clinical practice by developing medical learners who can engage in creative, evidence-based problem-solving (medical diagnosis, prognosis, biomedical research, and translational science). An understanding of historical disease models and philosophies of the body and illness promotes meta-cognitive thinking skills, more popularly known as ‘big picture thinking.’ For example, modern medicine may be in the midst of a Kuhnian paradigm shift from the late 19th century germ theory of disease to a new genetic model of etiology. The prominence given to Stem Cell Research, genomics, and gene therapy in current biomedical science is drawing funding from traditional efforts in public health, development of new antibiotics and vaccines, and neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The realization, developed through the historical analysis of the foundations of the health sciences, that historically different models of disease have existed and still exist at the present time, is a powerful cognitive tool for students in developing and weighing alternative new therapies or non-mainstream therapeutics such as complementary / alternative medicine. The concept learned from history that entire disease models have been abandoned and been replaced by competing models, and that progress in science does simply result from the accumulation of individual facts, encourages serendipity and ‘break-through’ scientific modalities. Drawing on the author’s history of medicine courses taught at Cornell University and Weill Cornell Medical College – Qatar, this contribution explores the benefits of teaching medical history in developing critical, analytical and meta-cognitive thinking skills among medical and premedical students.

Keywords:

Medical History, Medical Education, Cognitive skills.