Will reading literature, listening to music and studying history make you a better person? First the bad news: not necessarily. Witness the second world war when Nazi officers relished Romantic poetry and music even as they flicked the death switches. The humanities - academic disciplines that reflect upon the human condition - manifestly weren't doing their job: they weren't humanising.
This bleak view of the humanities as a failed humanising project has cast a long shadow over debates about their purpose and usefulness.
The good news is that many vocational disciplines are championing the humanities, seeing value not only in the expressive aspects of literature and the visual and performing arts, but also in the analytic, critical and speculative approaches they bring to real-life problems.
So there is reason to be optimistic: recent evidence suggests that reading literature, listening to music and reflecting on art works may be good for your health, after all.
Health is perhaps the most exciting field in which exchanges with the humanities are making a quantifiable difference. In recognition of this, the University of Hong Kong has recently established the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. The centre is the first of its kind in Asia, and one of a few worldwide to promote a two-way flow of expertise between medicine and the humanities.
As a place with a vibrant arts community, where different health care traditions overlap, at the forefront of biomedical research, with unique experience of dealing with communicable disease, Hong Kong provides the perfect setting for exploring the social and cultural contexts of the medical sciences and health care.
But what precisely do the humanities have to offer medicine? And how can medicine contribute to the humanities? As Richard Greene, host of the radio show Hollywood Clout!, put it to me recently, isn't fitting the arts into medicine like whacking a round peg into a square hole?
