The oncologist
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Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) founded The Kenneth B. Schwartz Center at MGH. ⋯ However, insensitive joking is offensive and distressing, and experience suggests a variable acceptance of humor by patients with life-threatening illnesses, making humor a high-risk strategy, and it can be a pejorative maker of an adversive power differential. The medical literature contains little on humor, and very little research has been conducted on this common aspect of human communication. Through an examination of physician and nurse experiences, the role of humor in medicine is reviewed.