The Compass: A New Mayo Clinic Proceedings Feature Dedicated to Topics in Bioethics and Health Humanities

The Compass will be a highly contemporary forum, focusing on the implications of emerging issues in medicine and the health sciences: questions of moral and clinical decision making including the central role of presence in dealing with medical uncertainties and the many vulnerabilities of illness (for both caregivers and patients). [...]we endeavor to understand how these scholarly efforts are to be incorporated into the arc of professional development that affects not only the caregiver but also the care of the patient over the long term. In his book RobotProof, the academic Joseph Aoun cites the importance of 4 cognitive capacities essential to interdisciplinary transformational learning needed to navigate the digital future: critical thinking; systems thinking; entrepreneurship, defined as the capacity to create value in original ways; and cultural agility.7 It is not coincidental that the new School of Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to integrate faculty from computer sciences with those of other disciplines, most notably the humanities.8 The Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva encourages a more active role for the health humanities, as ". a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural space for a bidirectional critical interrogation of both biomedicine (simple reductions of life to biology) and the humanities (simple reduction of suffering and health injustice to cultural relativism), considering the humanities along with medicine as biocultural practices.