Looking back to look ahead

This study provides a scoping review of the periodical BMJ Medical Humanities in order to identify thematic changes evident in the journal between 2000 to 2025. Metadata for the review, including abstracts, publication years, authors and PubMed Identifiers (PMIDs), were gathered from PubMed, followed by data cleaning to remove partial and duplicate documents; the resulting final corpus consisted of 912 open access validated sources. Analysis was conducted in three parts: (1) Prevalent topics were identified using BERTopic, a topic-modelling approach based on transformers well suited to large corpora; (2) Themes were created using a synthesis of machine-derived topics; and (3) Data were visualised through R to identify changes in the themes. Five overarching themes emerged from the analysis: The Patient Journeys & Specific Conditions has grown significantly since 2015, indicating a growing interest in the journal towards articles addressing phenomenology, stigma, disabilities and personal experiences. Meanwhile, Narrative & Arts in Health and History & Culture of Medicine have remained foundational while Practice & Education and Mind, Body & Ethics remain reflective themes. This paper highlights the debate between narrative medicine and narrative humility and the importance of critical and posthumanist perspectives, thereby promoting structural and phenomenological research approaches. The study’s findings may be limited by its use of abstracts only in topic modelling and the sensitivity of machine learning parameters. The study concludes with a discussion on its findings’ implications for justice-based education in the medical humanities and mixed-methods syntheses in the field.

Cultural humility · Medical humanities · Metadata · Narrative · Narrative inquiry · Narrative medicine · The arts · Thematic analysis · Empathy and Medical Education · Mental Health via Writing · Social Media in Health Education

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  Gyan Prakash•Another Reason•1999

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• Phenomenology of Illness

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• Doctors' Stories

  Kathryn Montgomery Hunter•Doctors' Stories•1991

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• Letting Stories Breathe

  A W Frank•Letting Stories Breathe•2010

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• The Meaning of Illness

  Open Access•S Kay Toombs•Meaning of Illness•1992

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• Narrative Medicine

  Rita Charon•Narrative medicine•2006

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• Medical Student Education in the Time of Covid-19

  Suzanne Rose•JAMA•2020

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• The One Health Concept

  Open Access•Delphine Destoumieux-Garzón, Delphine Destoumieux‐Garzón et al.•Frontiers in Veterinary Science•2018

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• Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases

  Open Access•Aysun Caliskan, Joanna J Bryson et al.•Science•2017

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• From public to planetary health

  Open Access•Robin Horton, Richard Horton et al.•The Lancet•2014

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• Narrative Medicine

  Rita Charon•JAMA•2001

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• Management of post-acute covid-19 in primary care

  Open Access•Trisha Greenhalgh, Matthew Knight et al.•BMJ•2020

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• Likert scales, levels of measurement and the “laws” of statistics

  Open Access•Geoff Norman, Geoffrey R Norman•Advances in Health Sciences…•2010

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• The Wounded Storyteller

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• Feminist, Queer, Crip

  Alison Kafer•Feminist Queer Crip•2013

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• Defining the Medical Humanities

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• Beckett on the Wards’

  Jonathan Heron, Elizabeth Barry et al.•Medical Humanities•2015

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• Misfits

  Open Access•Rosemarie Garland‐thomson, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson•Hypatia•2011

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• Mapping the Margins

  Kimberlé Crenshaw, Kimberlé W Crenshaw•Stanford Law Review•1991

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• How and why patients made Long Covid

  Open Access•Felicity Callard, Elizabeth Perego et al.•Social Science & Medicine•2021

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• Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History

  Open Access•H Landecker•Body & Society•2016

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• Structural competency

  Open Access•Jonathan M Metzl, H Hansen•Social Science & Medicine•2014

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• The Body Multiple

  A Mol, Barbara Herrnstein Smith et al.•The Body Multiple•2002

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• The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography

  Open Access•E Kirksey, S Eben Kirksey et al.•Cultural Anthropology•2010

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• Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

  Latour, Bruno Latour et al.•Critical Inquiry•2004

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