Two stories and an ode

Literature can enable insight and understanding in both writer and reader.

A reader has issues explained in memorable ways. I know that icebergs make a terrible racket grinding against each other because Coleridge has told me so: “The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around; / It cracked, and growled, and roared and howled, / Like noises in a swound'1 (despite never knowing what a swound is). And I empathise with Roquentin and his struggle with connectedness.2

Significant health benefits from writing about stressful events have been reported from many randomised control trials—for example, Smyth3 and Pennebaker et al4). The opinion in a JAMA editorial was: “Were the authors to have provided similar outcome evidence about a new drug, it likely would be in widespread use within a short time'.5 Sadly creative writing is never likely to be promoted by a drugs company. Virginia Woolf commented about her own use of this “drug”:

I used to think of him [father] and mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind. And now he comes back sometimes, but differently. (I believe this to be true—that I was obsessed by them both, unhealthily; & writing of them was a necessary act.)6

Literature, medicine, and health care are all the study and care of the individual person. An understanding of the human condition, in all its aspects, must be central to medical and health care education, research, and individual study. This can only be undertaken by including the values, ideas, and images of individuals and culture, as well as the way the human body and mind function and dysfunction. The nature, importance, and role of the human experience of patients and practitioners, including their experience of the patient-practitioner relationship, …