King’s College London is a leading centre of research linking medicine and the humanities. The College’s Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine is one of the largest in Europe and its Faculty of Arts and Humanities amongst the top-rated research groups in the UK. The College runs a number of programmes at Master’s and Doctoral level bringing scholars from medicine and the humanities together.

In 2000, the College set up an MSc in the Philosophy of Mental Disorder jointly in its Institute of Psychiatry and Department of Philosophy (which had already developed a dedicated and extremely successful BSc in Philosophy for medical undergraduate intercalators). In 2005 the Department of English established what is believed to be the world’s first Master’s degree in Literature and Medicine. In 2008 King’s was awarded a major grant by Wellcome to establish the Centre for the Humanities and Health, to create a multi-stranded programme of research on ‘The Boundaries of Illness’ that engages scholars from arts, humanities, and health disciplines, including literature, philosophy, history, visual arts, film studies, clinical psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and nursing. The College has offered a number of funded PhD studentships and postdoctoral fellowships to support this work.