The teaching of literature and medicine in medical school education

Abstract

inThe longer I practice medicine, and the longer I teach medical students, the centrality of literature to my work becomes ever clearer. Every day in the office, I listen to patients' stories; I hear about their pain, suffering, hopes, dreams, loves, and losses. Through my patients' stories, just as through literature, I learn how and why people suffer, and how they heal. I learn how people's philosophies and experiences affect how they see the world and how they go about living in it. These topics were blatantly left out of my formal medical education. My own background in literature has helped me to analyze, as well as to elicit, my patients' stories.Without a sound and extensive knowledge of people and of human nature, a doctor operates in a vacuum. "Noncompliance" becomes an enigma, rather than the logical outgrowth of a person's life choices. Recommending tests and treatment becomes an adversarial activity rather than a discussion and negotiation connected with the patient's value system and life situation.Literature provides us with a more extensive exposure to a variety of people than we can assure through medical practice alone, especially for beginning doctors and students. Moreover, through literature, we see what parts of human interaction can give others strength, and which parts cause them harm. We see how people change, and why they don't. We see what threatens them and what nourishes them. By knowing literary characters, we enlarge our ability to know people in general and our patients in particular.Sometimes students become angry about particular stories, especially those dealing with issues like racism, sexism, or strong emotions. Instead 1Address correspondence to Harriet A. Squier, M.D., M.A.,

Just a spoonful of humanities makes the medicine go down: introducing literature into a family medicine clerkship

“…These goals seem especially important during Year 3 of medical school, when both anecdotal reports and empirical studies document negative shifts in student empathy and communication skills 10,11 . Yet little information exists 12 on how to introduce the humanities at various levels of training, such as during a clerkship setting.…”

Literary narratives examining control, loss of control and illness: Perspectives of patient, family and physician.

“…Such topics are considered “difficult-to-teach” because, in the minds of at least some scholars, they are not easily reducible to neat sets of behavioral skills or universally applicable principles and rules. Because of the incomplete accessibility of these competencies through social science’s empirical and analytic methods, the search for viable teaching approaches has historically included the use of unorthodox pedagogical tools such as fictional literature i.e., poetry, short stories, essays, novels, and first person narratives (Squier, 1995; Downie, 1991).…”