Elsevier

The Lancet

Volume 356, Issue 9245, 2 December 2000, Pages 1920-1922
The Lancet

Literature and Medicine
Teaching literature and medicine to medical students, part I: the beginning

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)03270-0Get rights and content

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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.

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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