On the first crewed flight to orbit the Moon in over 50 years, astronauts requested that a lunar crater be named “Carroll” in memory of mission commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife. The phrase “to love someone to the moon and back” has long lived in the English language as a metaphor. I used it just yesterday to thank a friend for a coffee pick-me-up, and the day before that with my immigrant mother, because it somehow felt less awkward than a standalone “I love you.” 

For Wiseman, it was literal. At the edge of history, as humanity prepared to widen its small foothold in an observable universe some 92 billion light-years across, the Artemis II crew paused to honor one family’s grief. In doing so, they directed America’s gaze upward, toward something more enduring than the divisions below.

As a medical student, moments like this are breathtaking. They are selfless in the way we are rarely conditioned to think about achievement. In science, what is treasured is typically what can be measured — how far we venture, p-values, the number on a surgeon’s scorecard. Yet what resists measurement is often what is most deeply remembered. We understand Wiseman’s profound gesture immediately, just as we recognize a colleague’s exhaustion in their eyes or a patient’s unease in their hesitation before answering or asking a question.

That kind of recognition and cultivation of empathy are precisely what literature, history, philosophy, music and art teach. As Dr. Lloyd Brooks Minor, the current dean of Stanford Medicine and a lifelong cellist, puts it, the humanities “make sense of things like suffering, love, hate and hope.” 

And yet non-STEM fields have not-so-quietly receded from many academic paths. In his 2023 New Yorker essay “The End of the English Major,” Nathan Heller traces the decline of humanities-focused graduates across universities, citing a mounting pressure on students to choose majors with clearer financial returns. According to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges, only 3% of medical school applicants majored in the humanities, while the sciences comprise over 70% of applicants. Notably, humanities majors achieved higher average MCAT scores than those in all science disciplines except the physical sciences, and the highest among all disciplines in the critical reasoning and analysis section. 

This is not an argument against scientific rigor. Clinicians and researchers need demanding scientific training. But if medicine asks us to enter the most intimately vulnerable moments of another person’s life, then medical education must make room for the disciplines that help us understand what those moments mean. A patient’s symptoms come entangled in narrative, silence, contradiction and fear. And as healthcare moves into an era shaped by AI systems that predict risk and draft differentials, the work remaining irreducibly human is not less clinical, but more so.

The structure of pre-health education does not make pursuing humanities easy. With an extensive number of prerequisite requirements, students are nudged toward majors and activities where the requirements overlap neatly with the medical school checklist. 

But institutions are well positioned to recalibrate these incentives. The medical humanities should not have to survive as an extracurricular alone. Colleges could expand access by developing courses that integrate scientific training with literature, bioethics and history, and by allowing such coursework to satisfy premedical requirements when it demonstrably cultivates clinically relevant skills or thinking. Johns Hopkins offers a compelling example: its Medicine, Science and the Humanities major, designed for students pursuing careers in the health professions, is the university’s largest undergraduate humanities major. The program’s success suggests that students are not rejecting the humanities so much as seeking versions of them that speak directly to the lives and professions they hope to enter.

Institutions shape aspiration through the people they elevate. When students notice faculty, peers or alumni who inhabit both clinical and creative practice, they are given permission to imagine a fuller version of medical life. 

Stanford has long understood this, too, and importantly, treated the relationship between medicine and the humanities with an institutional vision of building well-rounded clinicians. That vision is matched by existing curricular pathways, including a minor, scholarly concentrations and elective opportunities in medical humanities across undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels, with the hiring of specific faculty members — such as a clinical director of storytelling — to support students on projects ranging from Modern Love submissions to op-eds and full-length novels. A medical humanities workshop, developed under the direction of Dr. Tanya Luhrmann and Laura Wittman, creates space for dialogue between aesthetic and empirical approaches to illness. Physicians are never neutral observers of suffering: cultural and sociopolitical forces determine who becomes sick, who receives care and whose pain is believed. To teach medicine well, then, is to teach students how to notice and speak to those forces.

For more than two decades, the Stanford Medicine and the Muse has recognized that the human-interfacing work of medicine, while deeply rewarding, is also emotionally exacting. Founded by anesthesiologist-poet Dr. Audrey Shafer, the program provides a home base for trainees and clinicians to take care of one another through words and art. At a time when even fully funded MFA programs have come under scrutiny for their unaffordability, Stanford’s imagination of literary access merits broader emulation not only for the audacity of its reach, but also its cultivation of a surprising mental wellness avenue for one of America’s most burned-out populations, offering renewed reminders of purpose within an otherwise intensely cerebral field.

Before classes started, Stanford Medicine organized a camping trip a few hours from campus. At lunch, a classmate, now a close friend, spoke about becoming a physician astronaut. They dreamt of going to the Moon and asked if I’d come along. 

I used to worry that I should share the same ambitions as others. I’ve found peace in the fact that I don’t. Whereas my friend is interested in pushing the edges of the universe as we know it and caring for the humans making that work possible, what I want feels smaller, but not any less freeing: to turn inward, focusing on the muscle fibers that hold people together and reminding us to make the most of what we have. 

So I think I will stay here, at least for now, writing, watching, loving the people beside me as they become who they are meant to be in the ways that bring meaning to them. I want to have fun. I want to fall in love. I want to learn to think better. I want to call my parents often. I want to train to be a good doctor. I want to celebrate my colleagues’ accomplishments. Maybe someday I will profile that friend for a magazine. I will assess these years not by how far I travel, but by how deeply I am able to be present within them, because in paying attention to the small, fleeting moments, I have begun to understand that they contain my universe.