APSA Newsletter - Phi Psi » 2008 Summer, Volume 3, No. 1 » Renaissance Doctors: Joint Degrees in Medicine, Social Sciences, and the Humanities

Renaissance Doctors: Joint Degrees in Medicine, Social Sciences, and the Humanities

Na'amah Razon & Scott Stonington, APSA Member-at-Large (Social Sciences/Humanities)

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In 2005, the University of California, San Francisco hosted the first conference of MD/PhDs in the Social Sciences and Humanities in over a decade. It was an attempt to coalesce a disparate community of physician-scholars - or "Renaissance Doctors," as they (half)-jokingly called themselves at the conference. Despite common methods, perspectives, and paths, physician-social-scientists and physician-humanists often forge a lonely way through institutions dominated by labs and clinical trials. Nonetheless, many of these individuals have reshaped the face of medicine. Paul Farmer and Jim Kim, both MD/PhD social science students at Harvard in the 1980s, have advocated for sophisticated social science concepts in medicine and public-health. Since the 1980s, the NIH has increasingly encouraged joint training in these fields, and the number of educational spots available has grown dramatically, particularly in the last ten years.