‘Part of my humanity left me the day I walked into medical school’: Navigating medical students’ identity dissonance through the medical humanities

Introduction Medical humanities curricula offer a lens for understanding how medical learners construct meaning and professional identity. While intended to cultivate patient-centered physicians, this process can provoke identity dissonance rooted in the hidden curriculum, leading learners to suppress, compartmentalize, or defer emotional engagement. This study examines how a medical humanities exercise shaped learners’ reflections on identity dissonance, affect, and professional identity formation. Through qualitative analysis of reflective narratives, we explored how students interpreted tensions between personal values, emotional experience, and professional expectations during the transition to residency. Within medical education, medical humanities function as a corrective to institutional cultures that sustain identity dissonance, offering space to reimagine what it means to be physicians.Methods The research team conducted a qualitative cross-sectional analysis of medical humanities reflections in response to reading Anatole Broyard’s ‘Doctor, Talk to Me’, submitted by 113 fourth-year medical students enrolled in the Transition to Residency course at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in 2024. Researchers employed a constructivist grounded theory methodology to independently code de-identified reflections and used triangulation to achieve consensus.Results Researchers identified 23 codes that were categorized into four themes: (1) modulating personal assumptions and professional expectations, (2) fragmented self, (3) situating affect, with a subtheme of deferred empathy, and (4) connectivity through shared humanity. Students frequently described identity dissonance and tensions between emotional engagement and prevailing professional norms. Many articulated forms of deferred empathy, postponing deeper emotional connection until they perceived greater professional autonomy.Discussion This study suggests that medical humanities encounters may help learners recognize and interpret identity dissonance while creating space to examine affective dimensions of professional identity formation. Medical humanities counter the tendency in medical training to manage difficult emotions through detachment by offering students tools to engage those emotions while remaining present with patients.