& nbsp ; The medical humanities program at East Carolina University School of Medicine has 50 contact hours with medical students in the required curriculum , fourth-year electives that are well-subscribed ( 47 % of the members of the class of 1989 took one or more ), and programs for residents , fellows , and faculty . The author discusses several crucial decisions made in the first year of the program ( 1978 – 79 ) that affected the nature and development of the program : first , to begin the medical humanities courses in the preclinical required curriculum and use these courses as a base to build on in the clinical years ; second , to develop a program through all years of training while preserving time for faculty research ; third , to arrange for program faculty to team-teach with clinical faculty ; fourth , to show the importance of the humanities programs and courses by the way in which they were constructed and situated in the curriculum ; and fifth , to seek primarily to teach a method of inquiry .