In February, The New York Times published a piece entitled “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” pointing to the declining numbers of humanities majors amidst their ever-more difficult marketability in today’s economy. With a much more steady demand for graduates in “technical” fields such as engineering or healthcare, the examination of “what it means to be a human being” is now “a great luxury many cannot afford.”

But are humanities so unmarketable?

Perhaps in dollars and cents, but in terms of social value, I disagree. And as a second year medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College — studying a field envied by many for the job security it affords — I would like to argue for the humanities pivotal role in economy, using a familiar example of the medical system.

With the recent Senate passage of a healthcare reform bill aimed at reducing the number of uninsured, hope lies on the horizon for expanding access to care. However, all too easily forgotten amidst the wonder of today’s medical technologies is the question of making our system more patient-centered. Since in healthcare we are treating people not diseases and our illnesses do not develop in vitro but in people’s lives, then a discussion of how to raise our system’s quality necessitates more than just one of financial arrangements.

In comes the role of humanities. As a freshman pre-med science major at Rice, I started out college unappreciative of their importance to medicine. “Why study them if there are so many more technical skills to master?” I reasoned. But on a service trip to rural mountains of Mexico, spring of my sophomore year, my perspective changed. Setting up one-day triage clinics in small communities, the real-world problems our patients presented us with — nutritional deficiencies, sun-induced eye scars and tuberculosis infections — hit me with a staunch realization: to treat today’s physical illness, which are so closely linked to social circumstances, requires a deeper understanding of human suffering. So when I returned, I immersed myself over the next two years in Latin American studies — everything I could learn to understand how history and culture affected health and well-being. After graduating, I came to WCMC eager to apply my humanities education to real-world medical problems.

Now, I spend my days memorizing cranial nerves and poring over neuropathology slides — certainly important tasks for future doctors. Yet in the mornings as I run down East River Park trail and I see the homeless — many of whom are uninsured and mentally ill — who lie along on patches of land abutting Roosevelt avenue, I question how such work will help me treat such populations. My psychopharmacology lectures made no mention of treating paranoid types like Bob, one homeless man who once accosted me and accused me of working with NYPD to jail him. They were too focused on mechanisms and adverse affects. Yes, there are opportunities for humanities in medical school: our patient interviews and write-ups, for example. Even then, the approach is narrowed down to algorithm. Times like these that make me wish I had taken more humanities to understand better how social circumstances affect people’s mental health.

How then do we usher humanities into medicine? Our college’s weekly David Rogers Health Policy Colloqium is one example. It is an “interdisciplinary and intergenerational group of health care professionals” that meets weekly at WCMC to “address challenges facing the U.S. Healthcare delivery system,” according to a flier. There we continue Dr. Rogers’ “battle for the soul of medicine” by cultivating a “broader interest in human welfare” to “build immunity against the disillusionment that occurs within medical training,” as was said by Adam Kaufman at a the colloquium. Another example I am hopeful of is a medical anthropology interest group that a couple of my classmates and I are coordinating. By addressing the impact of culture on illness and on medicine, we hope to enrich our medical school learning environment to better prepare us to care for our patients once we become doctors.

The deeper issue behind our healthcare system’s problems is not merely access but one of heuristics. Our thinking must be expansive and open new and novel circumstances by which people suffer and/or seek healing, or we shall be as guilty as critics have charged that we have set an arbitrary box around normalcy. If we only see patients only as physiological bodies or as statistics then we will have given up healing as an art and turned it into protocol, a recipe for continued failure. The humanities are not just extrinsic to our “technical” endeavors, lest we fall into the conundrum predicted by German philosopher Habermas of letting technology isolate ourselves from our humanity. In medicine, humanities form the heart of healing, and we must continue to study them to enrich our quality of care. I would encourage all undergraduates who find an interest in humanities but think they might want to become a doctor to continue that interest. For those who don’t see medicine in their future, the human purpose to which we subordinate our technical work is no less relevant. Humanities keep us grounded not just to what we’re doing but why. Without them, we may as well be people who did much but accomplished little.

Landon Roussel is a second year medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College. What’s Up, Doc?, a column featuring a rotating cast of medical students, appears alternate Fridays this semester. He may be reached at lsr2001@med.cornell.edu.