Last week, Sam Kean wrote about a new paper in Literature and Medicine. The paper, he explained, argues that “certain literary exercises can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face.”
As a physician who teaches both ethics and creative writing to medical students and house officers, I appreciate the value of using fiction and narrative to enhance the training of future physicians. These tools are certainly helpful in cultivating humanistic and compassionate doctors. However, medical school is rather late in the game to introduce these techniques. Ideally, admissions committees at medical schools should be looking for students who are imaginative and who are already reading literature, including literature about illness and physician-patient relationships. One might argue for altering medical school admissions requirements accordingly—for instance, replacing required courses in Newtonian physics with those that foster creativity and emotional understanding. As a physician, I am often asked to listen to my patients’ stories with empathy; in contrast, not once have I ever had to calculate the trajectory of a patient to be shot out of a cannon.
Jacob M. Appel, M.D., J.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education
Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York, N.Y.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Education
Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
New York, N.Y.
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 | The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) |
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Letter: Literature should be a medical school admissions requirement on.theatln.tc/ooFciqp
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The annals of literature are packed with writers who also practiced medicine: Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Carlos Williams, John Keats, William Somerset Maugham, and on and on. As doctors, they saw patients at their most vulnerable, and their medical training gave them a keen eye for observing people and what makes them tick.
But if studying medicine is good training for literature, could studying literature also be good training for medicine? A new paper in Literature and Medicine, “Showing That Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point,” argues yes. In particular, it proposes that certain literary exercises, like rewriting short stories that involve ethical dilemmas, can expand doctors’ worldviews and make them more attuned to the dilemmas real patients face.
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