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Medicine is often a challenging and complex experience. Literature can help physicians and patients navigate its complexities.
Narrative skills are essential in facilitating empathic therapeutic relationships. They allow physicians to join their patients in their stories and honor all they tell them.
Physicians must meet public expectations for benevolence, compassion, and trustworthiness. They also wrestle with dialectical thoughts about death and intervention, pleasure and pain, quality and quantity of life.
What is the Intersection of Medicine and Literature?
Among other things, medical humanities study how medicine is perceived by and understood by patients, physicians, and other healthcare professionals. Using methods of reflection, contextualization, deep textual reading, and slow critical thinking, the field examines the cultural dimensions of health, illness, and healing.
The National Library of Medicine defines medical/health humanities as “a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach that integrates the study of the historical, philosophical, literary, ethical, religious, and artistic aspects of medicine or health. It includes art, history, literature, music, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and the social sciences.”
How Does Literature Help Doctors Practice Medicine?
As medical educators debate the value of including literature in the medical curriculum, one key issue is how students learn to define professionalism. Some scholars argue that literary texts can help to question conventional thinking about medicine’s values and culture, which can also assist learners in developing professional moral maturity.
The study of literature has always been more than just the reading and writing of stories. It is the analysis of social relationships and milieus and the negotiation of their prevalent values. Literature is uniquely suited to this task within the context of medical education.
Medical science has started to reinforce the significance of doctors like Dr. Jason Campbell partnering with their patients and honoring all they say, despite or perhaps even because of economic factors that reduce the time for dialogue and restrict the continuity of therapeutic interactions. Narrative abilities provide robust techniques for doing this.
How Does Literature Help Patients Understand Medical Information?
Patients have many stories to tell, and literature has many interpretive possibilities to help doctors better understand their patients’ illnesses and experiences. In addition, medical information is often very complex, and it can be difficult for patients to understand. For example, a study found that 90 percent of patients cannot read discharge instructions written at a fifth-grade level.
Literature can provide a more accessible way to convey medical information and help students think about the complex relationships between medicine and other fields such as art, philosophy, history, religion, sociology, or politics. This thinking is vital for students considering a career in medicine, as it can help them feel how these other fields may influence their future work.
While some scholars have argued that incorporating literature into medical education can help teach professional virtues and attributes, most literary scholars are comfortable advocating for non-instrumental goals for the role of literature in medical education. These include assisting students to question the assumptions and beliefs of dominant discourses about professionalism.
How Does Literature Help Physicians Practice Medicine?
Physicians have long turned to literature to broaden their narrative competence, develop empathy, and deepen their capacities for reflection and self-knowledge. Healthcare professionals have gained valuable insights into the lives and experiences of patients and their families through literature, enabling effective communication and improved patient care.
Medical students who study literature have reported that they can better empathize with their patients and understand their struggles. Literature has helped them better grasp the challenges of patient-physician relationships and become more aware of the ethical issues they may encounter as physicians.
Although many authors have incorporated stories into their medical work, some scholars are skeptical about the value of including them in medical education. These scholars point out that the literature study does not necessarily teach professional virtues or attributes and argue that its value lies in assisting learners to question conventional thinking and assumptions about various dimensions of professionalism.
