Medical humanities: introduction to the theme.

The Twentieth European Conference on Philosophy of Medicine and Health Care was held in Helsinki, Finland, in August 2006 and highlighted the theme "Medicine, Philosophy and the Humanities." The four papers in this thematic section are developed from presentations made at that conference. They are the work of physicians and philosophers and present fundamentally philosophical reflections on the medical humanities. The authors show that philosophy offers both a substantial way of humanizing the theory and practice of medicine and a way to orchestrate the contributions of all the medical humanities.