The perceived value of adding history to the already rigorous curriculum within the health sciences has oscillated between being vital and best left to the past, particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries. But, according to at least one expert, just learning to think like historians and use the tools of their trade will build stronger doctors and scientists of the future.
“This is really all about contextualization,” Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD, associate professor and director of education in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, said of learning history for health science students. “It’s about understanding the problems, the events, the ideas, the conditions and the motivations to help us understand, ‘What is happening, why, and why this way and not another?’”
Goldberg, also director of the Public Health Ethics and Law Program at the Colorado School of Public Health, said that, ultimately, the contemporary approach to teaching history within the health sciences needs to proceed with a sense of balance.
“This has to be learner-driven and meet learners where they are,” Goldberg said. “We all, as health professional educators, sometimes have to make some compromises for what we would really ideally love everybody to know and what the learners actually need and what they can benefit from to be able to practice (in their field) the way that they want to practice.”
On this episode of Health Science Radio, Goldberg breaks down the importance of history and its place in a modern health sciences competency-based curriculum by examining the practical uses of thinking like a historian to better serve patients, inform research and build stronger bonds with the communities future health science leaders will serve.
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