In a building with large windows overlooking the Thames, in the heart of the Strand district, lies one of the most emblematic places where medicine meets the humanities: the Centre for the Humanities and Health (CHH) at King’s College London. For over fifteen years, philosophers, doctors, writers, historians, and artists have engaged in dialogue here to explore a question as simple as it is disarming: what does it mean to care for someone? This is not just a clinical question, but also a narrative, ethical, and aesthetic one. For this reason, King’s has chosen to build a stable bridge between scientific knowledge and the human understanding of illness
A Center Created to Give Voice to Experience
The CHH was founded in 2009 with the support of the Wellcome Trust, one of Europe’s leading foundations for biomedical and humanities research. Its goal is ambitious: to create an interdisciplinary center where the medical humanities—that intersection between health sciences and the humanities—can have both institutional form and an academic voice.
From the very beginning, the center was led by two internationally recognized figures, considered European reference points in narrative medicine: Brian Hurwitz, a general practitioner and Professor of Medicine & the Arts, and Neil Vickers, a literary scholar and former epidemiologist, now Professor of English Literature and Health Humanities.
Together, they gave the CHH a unique identity, where illness is not just a biological phenomenon but also a story to be listened to and interpreted. Their work has made King’s a European hub for those studying narrative medicine and the medical humanities.
Brian Hurwitz: Narrative as Care
Hurwitz was among the first to bring narrative medicine to British universities and Europe. In his view, every clinical case is already a literary form: a story structured with protagonists, conflicts, twists, and open endings. He demonstrated that medical writing—clinical diaries, reports, medical histories—is not just a data archive, but a web of stories reflecting fragility, interpretation, and uncertainty.
Hurwitz directed the CHH for many years, establishing the first Medical Humanities courses in the UK. In his seminars, doctors and literature students discuss narrative, ethics, and diagnosis. Literary texts become mirrors in which future healthcare professionals observe the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship and recognize both in themselves and in others the ambiguity of human suffering.
In his essay The Roots and Ramifications of Narrative in Modern Medicine, Hurwitz argues that medicine, despite its technological advancements, remains an art of language: without listening and storytelling, care loses its deepest dimension.
Neil Vickers: Literature as a Laboratory of Care
Alongside Hurwitz, Neil Vickers brought the perspective of literature and self-psychology. Trained as an epidemiologist, he left statistics to devote himself to Romantic literature and the philosophy of care.
In his classes, he encourages students to read Wordsworth or Keats not only as poetic texts but as explorations of states of consciousness, illness, loss, and healing. His book Being Ill: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment (2024, with Derek Bolton) reflects on how illness transforms one’s capacity to be recognized by others, highlighting that medicine is not only physical care but also a process of mutual recognition and self-redefinition.
Today, Vickers is Co-Director of the CHH and leads projects on the history of medical humanities and the evolution of narrative-based medicine, confirming his status as one of Europe’s leading figures in the field. His lectures traverse philosophy, anthropology, and the cultural history of medicine, interrogating how patients’ experiences are represented, heard, or rewritten.
A Laboratory of Ideas and Relationships
The CHH is not just a university department: it is a laboratory of thought and relationships. Here, students of medicine, nursing, psychology, and the humanities share practices, experiences, and questions.
Activities range from courses such as the MSc in Medical Humanities to seminars on Illness Narrative, Health and the Arts, or Philosophy of Care. The center hosts international conferences, workshops, and artistic projects, including the 2013 conference A Narrative Future for HealthCare, organized with Columbia University, a European hub for narrative medicine. The CHH also participates in initiatives such as the Creative Well-being Lab, which brings together artists and psychologists to explore art, mental health, and inclusive communities.
Research as Collective Care
Beyond teaching, the CHH promotes research on disability, the cultural history of psychiatric diagnoses, the meaning of health and wellbeing, and suffering as a narrative experience. Projects move between academia and lived experience, theory and practice. For Hurwitz and Vickers, the humanities are not a luxury: they restore complexity to the experience of living and being ill, giving depth to listening and the fragility of medical language.
A Model for Rethinking Healthcare Training
In an era of standardized and rapid medicine, King’s College offers an alternative model: training that combines science and sensitivity, technique and imagination, diagnosis and storytelling. Care is also taught through literature, film, art, and philosophy, showing that medicine is not only an exact science but an organized form of empathy. The medical humanities thus become both a political and poetic act: political, because they restore centrality to the patient; poetic, because every act of care is a shared narrative.
Care as Human Storytelling
The work of Hurwitz and Vickers, true European reference figures in narrative medicine, reminds us that medicine is primarily language: a dialogue between those who suffer and those who listen. Through the CHH, they have transformed this insight into educational and research practice, training doctors and scholars to be more aware, reflective, and human.
In the silence of a library overlooking the river, among philosophy books and clinical files, the message of the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London is clear: care is not only about healing but also about telling and listening together, valuing subjective experience.