The Park Ridge Center, which puts many of its energies into medical ethics, has also consistently directed others into medical humanities. The issue you are reading provides a context for this work.

People in the Western nations have been talking about the humanities since the time of Petrarch, the late Middle Ages. The word found currency in the U.S. a century ago when departments of the humanities started appearing in the university alongside those devoted to the sciences and professions. Still, students in most schools would say they were majoring in Spanish or in Russian History, not that they were in departments of humanities.

When the National Endowment for the Humanities was born it was still necessary for people in government, education, and the media to learn and to teach that they were not talking about "humaneness" or "humanitarianism," though many of them took pains to say that humanists were, of course, not talking against these, but on parallel tracks.

Congressional advocates of the Endowment had to spell out what the humanities included: languages, linguistics, history, philosophy, cultural anthropology, the history of law, and, yes, "comparative religion." Knowing that religion has always been a delicate topic in our diverse society, the legislators could not find an easy way to treat religious studies. To show that none of the faiths would be privileged and that students would get a world perspective, they settled for comparative religion. However clumsy the intrusion of the term, religious studies departments have made their way and are thoroughly at home in the humanities.

What, one might ask, makes up a culture in which humanities thrive? Philosopher Ernest Gellner, in his 1964 essay "The Crisis in the Humanities and the Mainstream of Philosophy," stripped it to this: it is a "culture based on literacy." Societies once called primitive were preliterate. Those devoted to nothing but science and mathematics are termed postliterate. Humanists, in contrast, love texts. But many of them are also necessarily literate in respect to reading traces of nontextual sorts: choreographic charts, words on monuments, floor plans of cathedrals or cities, works of art, and more.

Gellner has pointed out that the humanist who practices the humanities sometimes acquires strange characteristics in the eyes of many and, at times, is even seen as the enemy of the divine. Not so. The term humanist simply represented a person interested in mundane human literature who did not necessarily concentrate on divine, theological concerns. Through the centuries, however, literacy—not mundaneness—became the issue. "'Humanist' concerns now embrace the divine. (Both speak the same language)," says Gellner.

It is even fair to say that the study of religious and theological texts that reflect on health, faith, and ethics is part of the humanities. At the Park Ridge Center we believe that encounters with texts, be they literary, philosophical, or whatever, make humanists of us all.

Many in the medical humanities movements believe that conversation about texts can promote well-being and advance the pursuit of it. They believe that well-chosen literature opens the seriously ill person to a larger framework of meaning made up of constituent elements, some of which would be classed sacred and some secular. Yes, they want physicians and surgeons to "doctor" well and don't expect them to spout stanzas of Dante or Robert Frost just before the anesthesia takes effect. The arts, however, can provide perspective, enlarge the range of interpretations, and introduce texts, often from centuries behind us but still representative of what is ahead of us and our generation.

Bring on the herbs, then, if you wish, from preliterate societies and the charts and formulas of postliterate scientific cultures. These can play their part in interpreting illness and healing. And when they do, as some pages in this issue suggest that they do, those practicing the humanities can turn out to be exemplars of humaneness, their learning imparted by people with humanitarian concerns. This issue is not the last that will deal with such themes. The texts offer too much to humans to be put aside systematically or through indifference in a busy, practical, technical world.

Works Cited
Ernest Gellner, "The Crisis in the Humanities and the Mainstream of Philosophy," in J.H. Plumb, ed., Crisis in the Humanities, Harmondsworth; Penguin, pp. 45-81.