Medical Student Perspectives on the Medical Humanities: Transcripts of Focus Groups of Students at the Perelman School of Medicine

An emerging area of research has focused on medical student attitudes and beliefs about the arts and humanities and the role of these disciplines in medical education. These studies have investigated cohorts of European and Canadian medical students, but there is significantly less understanding of US medical student perspectives. To begin to address these gaps in the literature, we conducted focus groups of students at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to characterize the attitudes, beliefs and experiences of students regarding the arts and humanities, with the goal of contributing to the broader understanding of role of the arts and humanities in the education of US medical students.