Literature and medicine: physician-writers

Amerikastudien/American Studies

In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Phil Whitaker explains why a substantial number of well-known writers are also medical doctors. Whitaker, who belongs in this group himself, lists Anton Chekhov, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, and a few others, to state his point: "Their ability to feel what others feel, and simultaneously to view it with detachment, gives us perhaps our greatest strength as writers." Importantly, it is the physician's skills that pave the way towards writing as a profession, and not literary excellence that helps make a professional healer: doctors virtually read "[e]ach patient's illness" as "a narrative-symptoms as the beginning, diagnosis as the ending-and a middle that weaves a coherent and irresistible path between the two." Such explanations sound logical and comprehensible, yet they evoke new questions as well: why does it seem to be, almost exclusively, men, who translate their interaction with patients into poetry and prose? What motivates them to do so? Does their creative engagement inform their work as medical doctors? And, most importantly, perhaps: what do we learn about the medical profession, about writing, about an era, when we replace the hierarchical concept of the doctor-becoming-awriter by the idea of a mutually inspiring relationship between two systems of knowledge acquisition? Sari Altschuler's The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States builds on this idea of reciprocity. The book approaches "the practice of writing" as a "valuable training of the medical mind" (5) and discusses a number of well-known American physician-writers who wrote poetry or prose between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As public intellectuals, they relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" (8-11) to study and discuss health-related topics, test medical theories, fill research gaps, and solve medical and philosophical contradictions. Unlike Joan Burbick's Healing the Republic (1994) and other path-breaking publications in the field of medical humanities, The Medical Imagination does not reference physicians' writings to make a general statement about national health or American culture: carefully researched and very readable, the book sketches out an intellectually agile and dynamic community of early American physician-writers. It sheds light on individual biographies and friendships, emphasizes generational and cross-generational connections and conversations, and carves out the political concerns of individual participants who steered the relationship between health and literature in new directions. These medical men believed in the power of narrative to either cure or cause harm, but instead of resorting to narratives of healing, they preferred to outline and discuss the relationship between art and science, "imaginative experimentation," and "reductive, mechanistic paradigms" (102). Building on a variety of contexts, and rich in detail, The Medical Imagination offers an in-depth analysis of the life and oeuvre of key figures in American medical and literary history, including Benjamin Rush,

Heart, Vessels and Transplantation Journal, 2020

The following piece is a reflection concerning the interplay between the art of writing and the art of medicine. We are exploring the similarities and disparities of the field with a focus on doctors-medical students and fiction authors/poets. We are currently medical students and we identify as poets and fiction authors since our high school years and hence we are trying to point out our perspective. In the end we give some hints about the role that literature can play in modern medicine.

Clinical Medicine, 2010

The medical humanities attempt to emphasise the subjective experience of patients within the objective and scientific world of medicine. This article argues that the goal of medical humanities can be furthered by literature. Autobiographical accounts are used to illustrate the various ways in which literature can influence and enrich medical practice.

Health, 2014

the Narrative Based Medicine. The terms used indicate a mode of coping with the disease aims to understand its meaning in an overall, systematic, broader and more respectful of the patient. The Narrative Based Medicine fortifies clinical practice with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, metabolize, interpret, and become aware of the stories of the disease. Health professionals can acquire these skills through courses of medical humanities that include the use of different types of narrative text. Narrative medicine uses also literary texts in order to improve narrative and empathic ability of clinicians. This perspective also allows considering the Chekhovian literary work within a holistic vision linking scientific background and literary creativity. The material used for this study is the tale The Typhus by A. Čhekhov adapted from Novels and Theater. The text analysis is conducted with the logical and conceptual tools derived from the Psychology of Art and Creativity and in the perspective of narrative based medicine. In the story we are examining the Russian writer, who never gave up being a medical officer throughout his life, manages to make a perfect synthesis between the scientific background and his literary creativity, combining a careful clinical description of the symptoms of the typhus with evocative depictions of the characters and the environment he captured with brushstrokes capable of creating a picture having a purely artistic value and meaning. Narrative based medicine, which also makes use of narrative about the disease written by physicians or patients or even by medical patients, is a good opportunity for the medicine to go beyond the technocratic vision of the scientific evidence and draw closer to the wholeness of the experience of individual patients.

Medical Humanities, 2002

It is generally accepted that the practice of medicine could be improved by turning to the humanities in general, and to narrative and text interpretation in particular. Neverthless, there is hardly any agreement as to the nature of the clinical text, whether it be the patient's narrative that needs to be richly understood, or the patient as patient who must

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2019

Humanistyka i Przyrodoznawstwo, 2022

the medicine deprived of multidimensionality that is hidden underneath the literary words deteriorates into the field devoid of spirituality. i wpłynąć na jego wewnętrzną hierarchię wartości, podczas gdy medycyna, obdarta z wielowymiarowości literackich symboli, staje się przestrzenią pozbawioną duchowości.

MedEdPublish

This article was migrated. The article was marked as recommended. Life-writing is an increasingly recognized genre including, among other forms of expression, biography, memoir, journals, diaries and letters. In addition to providing a source of information about potentially significant historical and social dimensions of medicine, the life-writing of physicians also offers the public a greater sense of the writers' inner lives and provides a resource of wisdom and companionship to other physicians and health care professionals across time and various stages of personal and professional development. This kind of life-writing, when considered alongside patient accounts, can further contribute to what Anne Hunsaker Hawkins has called "a medicine that is truly human".

The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 1998

Despite many relevant benefits, the study of literature has been rejected by medical schools this century. However, the role of literature and the arts is coming to the fore again in many branches of medicine, including education, leading to a broader approach to medical practice than the purely scientific approach. This is likely to enrich the profession and individuals therein. As well giving as a wider general education, areas of medical training and practice that a literary education will benefit directly include critical reading and appraisal, communication skills, history taking, 'surrogate experience', understanding the role of the physician, ethics, and self-expression. Many of these are central to our understanding of good medical practice.

Pacific Coast Philology: Journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, 2020

In this impressive work of historical research and literary analysis, Sari Altschuler argues that literature and the imagination were vital to the production of medical knowledge in early America and must be acknowledged in the health professions today. The Medical Imagination shows that before the founding of the American Medical Association Council on Medical Education ( ) and the release of the Abraham Flexner Report ( ), strict divides between the humanities and medicine did not exist. Rather, in early America, "medical knowledge was understood to be formed in the mind of the brilliant observer-not through depersonalized, objective observation" ( ). Altschuler compares the philosophies of physicians who were also fiction writers and poets, demonstrating that physicians found that crafting literature offered chances for them to explore some of the most difficult problems of the body during tumultuous times of change. The book's imaginative approach to literature and health will likely attract a multidisciplinary audience