Development of the Durham Centre for Medical Humanities

The Durham Centre for Medical Humanities will bring together historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and artists to study how human experience shapes health and illness—and to put those insights to work in clinical settings. This matters because modern medicine excels at treating biological mechanisms but often struggles with the human side of care: how patients make sense of their diagnosis, how clinicians communicate uncertainty, or how cultural beliefs influence treatment decisions. The Centre aims to fill that gap by building systematic, evidence-based understanding of these subjective dimensions of health. If successful, the Centre could change how medical students are trained, how clinical guidelines are written, and how patients are involved in research design. These changes would not be visible in a hospital ward or a GP surgery overnight, but they would quietly reshape the assumptions behind everyday healthcare decisions—from how a doctor frames a prognosis to how a clinical trial recruits participants from diverse communities. The Centre will also apply for permanent Wellcome Trust Centre status, aiming to embed this interdisciplinary approach into the long-term infrastructure of UK health research.