Why the Humanities Matter in Medicine: UofL Alumna on Educating Future Doctors

By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences 

Kate Lafferty-Danner's experience earning a PhD in Humanities and an MA in Medical Ethics at UofL led to her current dream job of educating future physicians.  

“I never really thought I would be able to have that experience. I think my work at UofL gave me the confidence to be able to do this work,” Lafferty-Danner said. “I also became a teacher, became an educator in that space, too. I had taught a little bit beforehand, but getting the graduate assistantship helped so much.”  

Now serving as Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities at Geisinger College of Health Sciences Department of Medical Education in Pennsylvania, Lafferty-Danner credits the support she received from faculty along the way.  

“I always knew I wanted to do a PhD, and I knew that I enjoyed a really wide range of topics,” Lafferty-Danner said. “Medical humanities was a nice fit for me. I saw my mom go through cancer at a young age, so I had some personal medical experiences that I was working through, but I wanted to do it in a way that was a little bit more academic.”  

While working towards her PhD, Lafferty-Danner also worked full-time and became a mother. The interdisciplinary nature of the program – and its supportive faculty – allowed her to fulfill so many of her personal and professional goals simultaneously.  

“It really gave me the opportunity to explore my interests in ways that I think other programs probably wouldn't have,” she said. “For instance, my dissertation is on abortion in American culture, and I was able to pull from my bioethics coursework, but I was also able to pull in history, literature, and pop culture. This program gave me the language I needed to pull in all these different perspectives.”  

The humanities are more important than ever, she says, because they encourage critical thinking and examining perspectives.  

“I think it's so important that we see interdisciplinary education as extremely valuable,” she states. “I think it gives us unique perspectives. It forces us to critically think about our world, and it helps us make better choices because we can see situations from different angles.”  

For example, in her bioethics coursework, she did a lot of perspective taking.   

“Humanities are really all about perspective taking, seeing things that were created from different humans, right? Art, literature, poetry and so many other mediums, shows us a specific perspective. seeing something from in a different way. And I think as we see AI just increasing ever so fast, that human side of things is so essential, and I think it's important that we consider how we critically engage with things now in today's world. This program, both the Medical Ethics MA and the Humanities PhD program, helped me do all of that.”