Health humanities can be defined as a common ground between arts and humanistic culture, health and social sciences, ideal mixture to support health care and well-being.
In this context, since 2008 the Laboratory of Health humanities of the National Centre for rare diseases of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS, the National Institute of Health in Italy) has been running many research, education and communication activities: from the elaboration of recommendations on the use of narrative medicine – clinical-care intervention methodology based on a specific communicative competence, which focuses on narration as a fundamental tool to acquire, understand and integrate the different points of view (patient, doctor, social-health worker, family member and caregiver) – to the evaluation of their use in the clinical-care, from international research projects such as SToRe: Story Telling on Record on the integration of the narratives of patients, family members and health professionals in the medical records, to frontal lessons and activities on Arts and Medicine for high school students during their school-work educational programs at the ISS and the literary, artistic and musical competition "Il Volo di Pegaso" (The Flight of Pegasus).
