Welcome to the home of Dalhousie’s Medical Humanities Program. I really should say “programs,” since there are many windows in the house we call “Humanities.” We’re glad you dropped by to pay us a visit and we hope you will check out the role we play in the life and mission of our medical school.

I’ve put together on this page some pictures to make a point. Central to the collection you see below is a famous 19th century painting from the Tate Gallery in London, The Doctor, painted in 1891 by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes whose son died in 1877 while being attended by a faithful general practitioner. He captured that sad scene some 14 years later in this tribute to that physician.

Grouped below around that famous painting, perhaps somewhat irreverently, are pictures illustrating what I believe Sir Luke and his famous painting are saying to us. They may be speaking in a slightly different and perhaps more ‘modern’ dialect, but each picture conveys the rich variety and the privilege of the life we lead as practitioners of the Art called medicine. There are pictures of docs with kids and babies, of examining seniors, of wielding a skilled scalpel perhaps.

But what’s this? Two medical students dancing? A whole choir of medical students and friends singing? What does that have to do with Sir Luke’s painting? Or anything “medical” for that matter?

Well, it has a lot to do with it. It’s all about balance, and how we can try, in every way possible, to live a healthy and rewarding life in medicine. The message of the Humanities Program is that a rich and rewarding life in medicine takes work, but through that work and commitment to a healthy lifestyle and the humanitas of medicine we can achieve perhaps more than we ever dreamed.

We hope you enjoy your visit with us, and please come back.