The medical humanities, now a global phenomenon, are composed of two distinct streams: first, the theoretical study of medical culture (with little interest in medical pedagogy); and second, the cumulative improvement of medical education. This talk focuses on the second stream: innovations in the medical humanities in medical education. The focus is on what counts as progressive pedagogy in undergraduate medical education - ultimately serving to improve patient care and safety. I thoroughly revise what counts as ‘medical humanities’ through a translational model, turning the focus away from the traditional view of mobilising the arts to humanise biomedicine to uncovering and developing unexploited values already present in bioscience. Transcending the traditional arts-science divide, I focus on how we can counter the current dominance of instrumental values across medical education and the medical humanities - advertised in the displacement of a capabilities approach by functional competences, and complexity models by linear thinking. I fear that we have developed a sour medical pedagogy that produces technicians, rather than a lyrical approach that fosters innovative and caring doctors. I call for a shift from the relentless grip of a literal, linear, reductive instrumental values dominance to engage value complexes that are metaphorical, complex, and productive.

We must engage ethical, aesthetic, political, and transcendental values in medical education. This requires the development of pedagogies that focus on turning events into experiences, and information into knowledge and wisdom. In summary, undergraduate medicine curricula must be reconceptualised. Such curriculum reconceptualisation is urgent in an era in which global medicine engages with existential issues embracing ethical and political concerns such as effects on health of social inequalities, the climate crisis, and mass forced migrations due to conflict.