Tales of the humanities' encroachment on the domain of medicine are all the rage these days. TheNew York Times alone has run numerous articles within recent memory on the subject, chronicling everything from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine's popular art-appreciation course at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the reenactment of Greek tragedy for first-years at Weill Cornell Medical College. Meanwhile, hit TV dramas like "House, MD" and "Grey's Anatomy" consistently draw viewers fascinated by the unique tensions of medical practice: the raw emotions of human illness on the one hand, advanced technology and dispassionate clinical decision-making on the other.

And a quick Google search reveals that the media's interest is reflected in actual trends at medical schools around the country, with institutions ranging from the Mayo Clinic to Texas A&M boasting their own versions of humanities in medicine initiatives. There is even an entire school, the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University, devoted to the teaching and practice of "patient-centered medicine."

At stake here is more than just some passing fad. A debate over the proper role for the humanities in medical education is unfolding within academic medicine?s hallowed halls, with potentially far-reaching implications for the future of U.S. healthcare. Leading the charge are doctors who criticize modern medicine for straying too far from its ancient Greek origins as a holistic art, arguing that today?s medical schools have abandoned the nurturing of empathic qualities in favor of slavishly teaching the latest in a never- ending stream of high-tech innovations. Some of these physicians insist that exposing medical students to a more humanities-oriented curriculum may be the only way to reverse these trends and once again imbue their profession with meaning.

Whether or not such assertions are true, the renaissance of medical humanities programs nationwide suggests that the ground has already been laid for an evolution in American medical education. What remains to be seen is whether something so broadly cast as "the humanities in medicine" can survive the cost-cutting imperatives of managed care-- or the skepticism of a modern medical paradigm convinced of its own self-sufficiency.