Literature inspired my medical career: Why the humanities are needed in health care
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Friday, January 5, 2024
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As a published poet and scholar of the health humanities and ethics, I have a foot squarely planted in each field – or perhaps more accurately, I stand in what I perceive as the overlapping field of healing and poetic practices.
Key Points:
- As a published poet and scholar of the health humanities and ethics, I have a foot squarely planted in each field – or perhaps more accurately, I stand in what I perceive as the overlapping field of healing and poetic practices.
- I think literature can do this for other health care providers, too.
Narrative competence in medicine
- Narrative medicine is the practice of close reading and reflective writing to build narrative competence.
- Physician and narrative medicine scholar Rita Charon describes narrative competence as “the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret and act on the stories and plights of others.” Narrative competence, then, could inspire a person to pursue a career in health care and possibly make them a better clinician.
- In fact, studies of narrative medicine programs have demonstrated that they tend to not only increase students’ empathy and communication skills but also their tolerance for ambiguity and self-confidence.
Using the humanities to address health inequity
- Might narrative competence also expand clinicians’ understanding of health disparities and urge them to act in ways that lectures full of statistics couldn’t?
- The burgeoning field of critical health humanities theorizes that stories and art can help clinicians understand the unequal realities of different people’s lives and make clinician-patient relationships more therapeutic.
- This could lead her to make her practice more accessible to her patients – an action that would improve equity in health care for people with disabilities.
- Before ever meeting my first patient, I gained an expanded knowledge of the diversity of human experience from the books I read.
- This negates the fact that disease and health happen in varied and disparate social, cultural and political contexts.
Fitting in health humanities education
- There are ways to fit in more health humanities in all the busyness and bustle of notoriously grueling medical education.
- I’ve also led other health care providers in creative writing exercises during workshops, lectures and classes.
- Many institutions host book clubs, story slams, film screenings and other opportunities for medical learners to engage with the humanities.
- Monica Sok’s “ABC for Refugees” powerfully paints a portrait of a young child caught between languages and cultures – a reality that many pediatric patients face.
- “Ode to Small Towns” by Tyree Daye upends common assumptions about rural life and demonstrates the meaning of place in hymnlike vernacular.
- This article is part of Art & Science Collide, a series examining the intersections between art and science.
Melding literature and medicine
- The possibilities for collaboration between literature and medicine are wide open.
- The history, sociopolitical context, imaginative perspective and reflective practices the humanities offer may improve the practice of medicine.
Irène Mathieu, MD, MPH is an iTHRIV Scholar. The iTHRIV Scholars Program is supported in part by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers UL1TR003015 and KL2TR003016.