Alan Bleakley, member of the NBM Lab’s International Advisory Board, has been a driving force behind the international movement to establish the medical humanities as a core part of the medical education curriculum. The range of his scholarly work reflects his interdisciplinary background in the biological sciences, psychology, cultural studies and education. His applied research focused on communication training inter-professional surgical teams and his theoretical work focuses on re-visioning medical education through innovative pedagogies.

Using the lens of critical health psychology and liberatory pedagogy, Bleakley explores how the humanities promote more non-linear and valued-based ways of thinking that embrace ambiguity and working ‘at the edge of chaos’ in Medical Humanities: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (Routledge, 2024). While embedded in rich conceptual discussion, this book tackles critical practical issues about the value of the medical humanities and how the medical school curriculum can be transformed.

The Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry (2024), co-edited by Bleakley and physician-poet Shane Neilson, explores how a poetic sensibility might change medicine. This collection also addresses a number of pragmatic concerns such as: Do poet-doctors reconcile the outwardly antithetical approaches of bio-scientific medicine and poetry in their daily work? How do poets writing about medicine identify as patients? What can medicine do for poetry? How can poetry be used in the clinic?

These two books urge us to embrace creative and metaphoric ways of thinking and make a compelling case to recognize the subjectivity (and humanity) of clinicians. As Bleakley and Neilson state: “While medicine is science-based, as theory, in practice it is a science-using activity with a high degree of ambiguity, uncertainty, and contradiction. The practice of medicine is not free from the contamination (for better or worse) of mood. We cannot get away from the conundrum that the observer confounds the experiment.”