Pamela Krause and Yvonne Saaybi reflect on the role of the humanities in transforming healthcare in crisis-affected regions, based on their experience as the co-founders of the Middle East Medical Humanities Research Lab in Beirut.
Amidst overlapping crises of war, economic collapse, and the deterioration of healthcare infrastructures, the creation of the Middle East Medical Humanities Research Lab marks a decisive step toward reimagining healthcare through the humanities. Established in 2023 at Saint Joseph University in Beirut, this pioneering center results from a collaboration between the Faculties of Letters and Human Sciences (FLSH), Medicine (FM), and the Hôtel-Dieu de France Hospital. It stands as the region’s first dedicated research institution explicitly committed to advancing the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities.
Emerging from a context in which structural fragility and socio-political trauma profoundly shape both the practice of medicine and the experience of illness, our research Lab responds to the urgent need for a more reflective, context-sensitive, and inclusive approach to care. Co-founded by Pamela Krause (Philosophy), Yvonne Saaybi (Literature), and Rami Bou Khalil (Psychiatry, Hôtel-Dieu de France), the Lab is grounded in a shared commitment to disciplinary cross-pollination. It brings together expertise in philosophy, literature, the arts, and clinical medicine to foster a holistic and critical understanding of health and healing.
In collaboration with international partners, such as the Centre for Bioethics and Humanities in Medicine at the University of Geneva and the Collège des Humanités Médicales (COLHUM), our Lab has rapidly established itself as a regional and international hub. Through an active program of seminars, international colloquia and collaborative research initiatives, the Lab seeks to move beyond biomedical reductionism by foregrounding the narrative, ethical, cultural, and epistemological dimensions of care, mobilizing a network of researchers across disciplines and continents.
We were struck by the rapid and significant engagement of over forty researchers, from diverse disciplines and regions, collaboratively addressing the ethical, cultural, and epistemological dimensions of care. This scholarly momentum highlights the pressing necessity for a dedicated research laboratory to rigorously examine and respond to the distinctive challenges faced by this region. In 2025, members of this vibrant research lab jointly edited and contributed to a special issue of the Revue des Sciences Humaines (Human Sciences Review) dedicated to the latest theoretical and methodological debates in the field of medical humanities.
Healing amid multicrisis: ecocide, conflict, and economic collapse
While the medical humanities are gaining traction in curricula and clinical training around the world, their integration in the Middle East remains uneven—shaped by complex socio-political dynamics and institutional constraints. Challenges such as limited funding and a strained healthcare system have hindered the development of ethics committees and professional training. For instance, a recent article by Doctors Without Borders (2024) highlights how Lebanon’s political and economic situation is severely restricting access to care. A survey also found that only 5.2% of Lebanese medical professionals had completed mandatory training in research ethics (Azakir et al. 2020; Atallah, et al. 2018).
Integrating medical humanities into health sciences education is not just a teaching innovation—it is an ethical necessity. Public colloquia have shown how these initiatives can help healthcare professionals, students, and communities engage with the complex sociological, gendered, and ethical questions shaping medical practice. This kind of engagement reveals the transformative potential of the humanities in reframing how care is understood and delivered, particularly in regions facing crisis.
Beirut offers a striking example of these challenges. Since Lebanon’s economic collapse in 2019, the city has been covered in persistent smog—caused by over 8,000 diesel-powered generators used to offset electricity shortages. In areas like Makassed, fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) has reached 60 micrograms per cubic metre—four times the WHO’s recommended limit (Cheeseman 2024). In conversation, Dr. Bassel El Baba, a specialist in reconstructive microsurgery and a member of our research lab, notes a concerning rise in cancer diagnoses. He asks a fundamental question: amidst worsening ecological conditions, how can long-term care be sustained, especially for the most vulnerable? This points to the urgent need for health education to address not only biological but also ecological and socio-economic dimensions of care.
In environments marked by pollution and environmental breakdown, the consequences are borne disproportionately by the poorest. The humanities equip future healthcare providers to understand how structural inequalities—whether environmental, economic, or social—shape patterns of illness and access to care. Medical humanities promote practitioners who are attuned not only to disease symptoms, but also to the larger political and ethical contexts in which suffering occurs and healing is made possible.
Another important dimension is gender. While more women in Lebanon are entering medicine, they continue to face biases at many levels: socially, through stereotypes; regionally, in rural vs. urban attitudes; institutionally, where leadership roles remain male-dominated; and during clinical encounters, where authority is often gendered. These inequalities affect not only careers but also patient care, particularly where women are reluctant to consult male doctors. For example, a survey of 1,000 adults showed that 44.2% preferred male cardiac surgeons, compared to only 3.7% who preferred female surgeons (Abdul Halim et al. 2020). Similar biases were found in neurology and orthopedics.
Domestic violence is another widespread issue in Lebanon, including physical abuse, marital rape, and psychological harm. Since 2005, the NGO KAFA has worked to combat violence against women and children. A 2016 KAFA survey revealed that 44% of Lebanese individuals personally know someone who has been a victim, highlighting how pervasive the problem is (KAFA 2016). Patriarchal norms continue to fuel this violence.
Healthcare professionals have a critical role to play in supporting victims. This includes not only medical and psychological expertise but also the ability to identify abuse, document injuries, and assess risks. In Lebanon, where legal prosecution requires material evidence, such skills are essential. Working with social workers is key, as is training to help overcome the silence shaped by stigma and fear. Medical humanities offer valuable tools here: by fostering narrative competence (Charon 2006), ethical sensitivity, and awareness of suffering, they help clinicians listen more closely to the often-silenced voices of abused women.
Exploring the healing power of the humanities
Literary critic Michel Collot (2024) highlights the important role that literature, philosophy, and the arts can play in deepening our awareness of the environment. He argues that these fields do more than just represent nature—they help us connect with it emotionally and reflectively. Through stories, symbols, and creative expression, they teach us to notice the vulnerability of non-human life and to recognize how closely human and natural worlds are connected. This aesthetic and ethical mediation aligns with the core principles of the ethics of care, which encourages responsibility, attentiveness, and a strong sense of relationship with others and the planet. In this light, what we call “green heritage”—the memory and meaning we attach to the natural world—becomes more than just a collection of environmental resources. It becomes a vital way to pass on ecological values and to inspire ethical action in response to environmental harm.
Literature and the arts, by sustaining this complex mediation between affect, knowledge, and normativity, are thus indispensable in confronting ecocide and imagining modes of coexistence anchored in care for the living. This understanding guided the organization of the international seminar titled Resisting Ecocide: Poethics, Care, Philosophies, held amid the ongoing war in Lebanon, to examine the multifaceted impacts of ecocide and explore how the humanities can contribute to healing in times of crisis.
Since the outbreak of war, Israeli bombardments have claimed nearly 3,000 lives and forced 1.3 million people into exile (UN OCHA 2024). The conflict has also devastated Lebanon’s natural landscapes and agricultural lands. Over 5,600 Israeli strikes have been recorded in southern Lebanon between October 2023 and September 2024 (Human Rights Watch 2024). Many involved white phosphorus—an incendiary weapon banned in densely populated areas by the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (Amnesty International 2024). The resulting fires and contamination have degraded over 17 million square meters of land—equivalent to 2,381 football fields—threatening ecosystems essential to endangered species such as Mediterranean monk seals, turtles, and hyenas (Salhani 2024).
This “green heritage” constitutes a crucial part of Lebanon’s collective identity and memory, embodying the intimate relationship between people and their natural environment. Its destruction thus affects not only ecology but also cultural continuity and communal belonging (UNESCO 2025). In this framework, poetry and philosophy transcend aesthetic functions to become critical ethical practices that explore new modes of world engagement and meaning-making amid violence. The seminar’s poetic readings and scholarly dialogues highlighted pressing issues related to collective memory, care ethics, and ecological justice. Ultimately, the event aimed to confront Lebanon’s ongoing—often invisible—environmental destruction, amplify the experiences of human and ecological suffering, and examine how the humanities can contribute to healing and the restoration of respect for nature during conflict.
Conclusion
The Middle East Medical Humanities Research Lab remains hopeful and open to interdisciplinary collaborations addressing critical regional challenges through the humanities. Currently, we focus on the problem of collective memory—initiated during the international colloquium Memory and Its Disturbance (La mémoire et son trouble)—to investigate how narrative, philosophy, and the arts can foster healing and reparative justice in contexts marked by trauma and institutionalized amnesia, such as Lebanon. In settings where collective forgetting is embedded in social and political structures, the humanities provide essential tools to confront denial, restore historical consciousness, and support processes of reconciliation and restoration. This work reaffirms our commitment to the humanities as a vital force for both individual and communal repair amid ongoing crises.
About the authors
A specialist in contemporary philosophy, Pamela Krause is a lecturer and program director at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. She is the co-founder of the Middle East Medical Humanities Research Lab, the first research center of its kind in the Middle East. Her research focuses on the contribution of the humanities to medical practice, particularly through an epistemological and critical lens on psychiatric nosology and narrative therapy. She is also interested in how philosophy and literature can offer healing ways of inhabiting the world. She has co-edited several collective volumes, including: Refaire monde, 2022; and Penser le monde, de Kant à aujourd’hui, 2023. She is also the author of numerous articles published in journals such as Revue Soin, Sens et Santé, and published by Classiques Garnier, Kimé, and Presses universitaires de Liège, among others.
Yvonne Saaybi is a lecturer (French literature) at Saint Joseph University in Beirut and co-founder of the Middle East Medical Humanities Research Lab. Her research interests focus on medical humanities in late 19th-century French literature. She is the author of L’Esthétique du texte malade dans la littérature française fin-de-siècle, 2025, and of several scholarly articles, including “Le féminin fin de sexe : pour une esthétique de la perversion dans l’imaginaire rachildien” in Rachilde ou les aléas de la postérité : de l’oubli au renouveau, 2023. She has also co-edited a collective volume: L’Art de guérir. Introduction aux humanités médicales, 2025.
References
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