Well Connected: Pharmacy Education and the Humanities

Traditional pharmacy education emphasizes the biological processes of diseases and their pharmacological treatments. While the intense focus on biomedical aspects of disease is vital to educating pharmacy students, this focus is often insufficient in conveying what patients experience. The humanities, however, offer powerful characterizations of the disease experience for individuals as well as its impact on the human condition more generally. In this essay, I describe how using literary texts with pharmacy students provides them with a fuller appreciation of what patients face with their diseases. The goal of this endeavor is to make students more effective as pharmacists in detecting and responding to their patients’ problems and needs by connecting their biomedical knowledge to depictions and meanings of illness experiences.