The fate of medical and humanitarian education in Russia

Abstract

The article points to various alarming tendencies of dehumanization of modern medical education in Russia and in the world. Apart from economical and political solutions, the article suggests to address the most fundamental reason for negative attitude to humanitarian subjects in modern biomedical education the struggle between reductionist and holistic worldviews. While modern biomedicine is increasingly dominated by an increasingly rigid reductionism, which reduces living things to non-living things at the level of atoms and molecules, humanities knowledge is organically characterized by a holistic approach to the human being, i. e., holistic foundations and principles. The split of these two directions projects itself in the split of basic medical subjects and humanities disciplines. The authors see the only radical way to overcome this schism as a transformation of biomedical knowledge itself in the direction of holistic reductionism a synthesis of holism and reductionism. This integrative type of knowledge will project itself into a fundamentally different, allied, relationship between the more reductionist and holistic strands of a single integrated biomedicine.