Literature and MedicineTeaching literature and medicine to medical students, part I: the beginning
Section snippets
Choosing texts
Our thoughts, when we started, were to look for texts with manifest relevance, but experience persuaded us that this was a naïve aim. Medicine, health, and illness in literature are usually present for literary purposes, not medical: and therefore without a literary reading such texts will seem vapid or simply inaccurate. However personal accounts of illness, such as Ruth Picardie's articulate and courageous account of her struggle with breast cancer, are not really literary, but virtually all
Images of the doctor
The doctor as metaphor is a difficult issue, but for different reasons. In popular romance the doctor may be heroic, handsome, and compassionate, but at a more serious level, doctors in English are rarely positive figures. Like Chaucer's Physician in The Canterbury Tales, the doctor may be a money-grubbing charlatan, for example, or a deluded fool, like Dr Lydgate in Middlemarch,10 who surrenders his self respect and sense of duty to the gorgeous but vacant woman he marries (she is one of the
Death and madness
Writers are often vague or inaccurate about medicine. A major exception, understandably, is when it comes to the psychological consequences of illness, and in particular to the description of mental illness and bereavement. Students are given a tape of relevant poems, read by Ali Henry, a professional actor.
There are two periods that are commonly mentioned in this respect. One is the late 18th century, when there were three substantial poets who suffered serious mental illness: Christopher
Text selection
There are strong arguments for only studying longer texts in their entirety—Hamlet is what the whole play says, not a couple of pages. However, a short course can act as a taster for a wide variety of new texts, if these can be linked to developing themes. This is what we have chosen to do (feedback shows the variety is much appreciated as an introduction to the world of literature). We therefore work with one or two full-length texts (such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the time of cholera
Conclusion
These are the limited aims of a short course. Clearly, under the circumstances in which we work, we can hope only to enlighten medical students rather than train literary critics. SSMs, particularly those which do not seek to build on already existing clinical knowledge, will usually have a similarly limited, introductory scope, and will require a clear rationale. We seek to provide this for our own course which will be presented in more detail in the second of these papers.
References (16)
Tomorrow's doctor
(1993)Dombey and Son
(1970)Illness as metaphor: AIDS and its metaphors
(1991)Seven types of ambiguity
(1930)The portrait of a lady
(1997)Cancer ward
(1997)The plague
(1989)
Cited by (35)
Reading between the Lines: Finding Fundamental Themes in Fiction
2015, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent PsychiatryEnglish literature and the medical art
2005, Ethique et SanteLiterature as a Pedagogical Tool in Medical Education: The Silent Patient Case
2021, Humanities (Switzerland)Imagination in narrative medicine: A case study in a children’s hospital in Italy
2016, Journal of Child Health CareAnalysis of medical student's book reports on Cronin's the Citadel: would young doctors give up ideals for prestige and wealth?
2016, Korean Journal of Medical Education
*See Lancet WEBSITE www.thelancet.com