Regular readers may notice an intriguing chronological parallel as they peruse this issue.

The year 1965 marked the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which served as both sign and source of the turn to the humanities that our authors trace. With NEH, Congress recognized that history, languages, literature, philosophy, cultural anthropology, religion, and the arts had far more to give society and culture than had yet been understood or appreciated.

That same year also saw the legislation that made possible the "new immigration" celebrated in our September/October 2000 issue. In their very different ways, these 1965 events made a substantial human impact, both in the culture at large and in the clinical and public policy realms of health care. The new immigration not only challenged old ways of thinking about health, healing, and health care delivery; it also prompted many people to rethink old visions of life's meaning and purpose, reconsider the nature of religion and its relation to "spirituality," and respond to difference with fresh creativity and hospitality.

While the turn to the humanities may have been less dramatic, this Bulletin shows that it is nonetheless an important one. James Veninga offers examples of significant inquiries that public humanities programs have generated, and he observes the impact that such programs are having on scholarship itself.

Glen Davidson traces the movement that brought the humanities into physician education, once so dominated by scientific medicine that attention to the "whole person" was virtually absent. From the arena of medical education, Suzanne Poirier shows how the medical humanities offer students an alternative way to perceive and understand both their experiences and themselves.

Humanists have explored areas, like medicine, long considered "non-humanities." Yet, they have also reached across disciplines within the humanities, as Linda Mitteness does in her anthropological study of religiously motivated compassion in health care. Mitteness finds such an inquiry risky: will it make the sacred seem "only" profane, analyzable without remainder into psychological or social processes? Yet her analysis enriches understanding by revealing how religious beliefs and values contribute to caregivers' attitudes and practices.

However noble the image of the humanities may seem—in contrast to some features of contemporary medicine—where money and status are involved, humanists too may be subject to a certain corruption. Davidson suggests that precisely this danger may have overtaken a humanist scholarship that has made too easy a peace with the worst of scientific medicine, accepted its economic fruits, and done both at the expense of the public trust and the well-being of vulnerable populations. Readers will have to judge for themselves. In any case, the self-critical note he sounds also belongs to the humanistic tradition at its best.