After the Second World War, medical schools in the United States of America and (later) the United Kingdom developed increasingly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary curricula. Such shifts were a response to international trends and to the domestic economic/social environment. The changes first took the form of the teaching of philosophy and medical ethics before, from the 1980s in the USA and the 1990s in the UK, medical schools increasingly expanded their curricula by offering optional or integrated ‘medical humanities’ courses. This proposed paper will examine the integration of philosophy, history and the arts into the medical curricula of many universities and medical schools. It will particularly focus on the aim of new courses in ‘medical humanities’ and ‘medical ethics’ to improve empathy and communication skills in medical students. The paper will demonstrate that there was a tension between use of the arts in medical curricula, the objective of creating empathy amongst students and the rise in evidence-based healthcare since 1945. The tension lay in the difficulties of measuring the success of such approaches, which was necessary to ensure the survival of new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary curricula in the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first centuries. Such problems resulted in the development of a number of new strategies for measuring different types of medical ‘knowledge’ amongst students, including tests for the ethical nature, empathy and humanism of ‘tomorrow’s doctors’. Overall, the proposed paper addresses the conference theme by demonstrating the impact of new forms of artistic and humanistic ‘knowledge’ on the transatlantic medical curricula and on modes of assessment.