Healing allusions? The use of poetry in teaching medicine

This paper aims to encourage medical teachers who have never thought of using poetry in their teaching to do so. The increasing profile of poetry in medical teaching is outlined, and the many advantages of poetry as a teaching medium in medicine are discussed using multiple examples from teaching materials used by the author. Some of the potential pitfalls of poetry use are also explained and discussed. A brief outline of some of the basic elements of the analysis of poetry is then given and Helen Dunmore’s The Surgeon Husband is used to illustrate their use and show how the poem can raise questions for group discussion. Finally, the themes of death and bereavement and then mental illness are explored with a variety of poems, with examples of clinical and ethical questions for discussion arising from them.

Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, 2024

The interplay of art and medicine is centuries long. In contemporary medical education, "arts and humanities" relevant to medical practice are often instrumentalized and justified in curriculum to "improve" training, increasing empathy, for example. The aesthetic pleasure of engaging with art is less considered. In this essay, as a family physician, I reflect on my aesthetic experience of poetry as a gateway to consider the possibility of aesthetic experience in clinical practice. As I tarry with language in a poem, new horizons of understanding are extended. In a similar way, in clinical practice, when I allow my senses to experience a patient aesthetically, be it by seeing, smelling, touching, I can enter a new appreciation of their personhood. Using a combination of poetry and visual art, I draw on an example of an older man, unstably housed, to elucidate how experiencing arts and humanities in medical practice can answer what Gadamer called the first task of medicine, that is to restore a person to their original state.

2017

The vast range of poetry by people with serious illness or by those in the aftermath of catastrophic injury testifies to the fact that poetry helps people cope with the pain, fear, humiliation, and sense of loss that often come with illness. Their words can provide valuable information for caregivers. Clinicians who read poetry become better listeners. Poetry inclines one to notice how a thing is said; in the practice of poetry, how becomes as important as what. A poem can deliver information that is in its way more precise than the notes clinicians are trained to record on a chart. Close reading of poetry by patients has become a part of medical education in many medical schools, and needs to be more widely integrated. As the examples in this chapter show, poems can provide exactly the “anecdotal evidence” that may make a decisive difference in the course of healing by complementing statistical data or other forms of “hard” evidence.

Medical Humanities, 2000

In blunt terms, the thesis I argue for here is that poetry is of no use in health care ethics education, because poetry is of no use. Put more circumspectly, insofar as a poem is given to health care students to read as a poem, it will not help achieve the ends of health care ethics education This is a conceptual point, arising from the idea that any genuine engagement of an individual with a poem is unpredictable. My main example is Thom Gunn's apparently very useful poem As Expected. We can't predict what reading (interpretation or understanding) of this health care students will come to if they are allowed to engage with it. To treat the poem as a site at which a predetermined set of useful things may be found is to fail to treat it as a poem.

Perspectives in Medical Humanities publishes peer reviewed scholarship produced or reviewed under the auspices of the University of California Medical Humanities Consortium, a multi-campus collaborative of faculty, students, and trainees in the humanities, medicine, and health sciences. Our series invites scholars from the humanities and health care professions to share narratives and analysis on health, healing, and the contexts of our beliefs and practices that impact biomedical inquiry.

BMJ supportive & palliative care, 2018

Although many well-known poems consider illness, loss and bereavement, medicine tends to view poetry more as an extracurricular than as a mainstream pursuit. Within palliative care, however, there has been a long-standing interest in how poetry may help patients and health professionals find meaning, solace and enjoyment. The objective of this paper is to identify the different ways in which poetry has been used in palliative care and reflect on their further potential for education, practice and research. A narrative review approach was used, drawing on searches of the academic literature through Medline and on professional, policy and poetry websites to identify themes for using poetry in palliative care. I identified four themes for using poetry in palliative care. These concerned (1) leadership, (2) developing organisational culture, (3) the training of health professionals and (4) the support of people with serious illness or nearing the end of life. The academic literature was...

Journal for Learning through the Arts, 2011

medical students during training (Hojat, 2009). For example, medical-specific empathy decreased dramatically in students during their third year of school (Hojat, Vergare, Maxwell, et al, 2009). Moreover, emotional empathy had dropped in the average student from the 52 nd to the 33 rd percentile after three years of pre-doctoral training (Newton, Barber, Clardy, et al, 2008). Emotional empathy is an independent determinant of relationship success (Mehrabian, 2000), and good relationships with patients and coworkers promote patient satisfaction, foster adherence to treatment plans and minimize malpractice claims (Hojat, 2007). In short, good relationships foster the best patient outcomes most effectively (Lee, 2010). Cohen (2007) suggested that such professional behavior is animated by humanistic values. Values and characteristics animating professionalism include altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability and respect for others (American Board of Internal Medicine, 1999). Definitions of such values often remain abstract to students, however, and are thus difficult for them to use to grow and develop personally and professionally (Wear & Nixon, 2002). Activities to foster critical reflection can help to animate the humanistic values needed for professional behavior by giving students concrete contexts in which to consider the values and behavior. In this way, activities to foster students' critical reflection can be expected to promote professionalism (Mann, Gordon & MacLeod, 2009). Such exercises using literature have been employed by others (Wear & Nixon, 2002) to foster student engagement in concrete ways with the daily challenges of medicine. Engagement with literature evokes the discomfort, distraction and even irritation needed to stimulate critical reflection (Wear & Nixon, 2002). Literature evokes these feelings in students, especially when it causes them to see their own (or others') behavior as incongruent with their humanistic values. When students see their own (or others') behavior as inconsistent with their values, they experience dissonance. In a recently published model of students' processing of an activity meant to foster critical reflection, the activity either did or did not cause dissonance (Thompson, Teal, Rogers, et al, 2010). Dissonance triggers critical reflection and work by students either to make their professional behavior more consistent with their humanistic values or to preserve their values in the face of poor behavior by others. Thus, dissonance causes critical reflection, and critical reflection leads either to reconciliation or preservation of values or behaviors. Both reconciliation and preservation can be positive (Thompson, Teal, Rogers, et al, 2010). Positive reconciliation occurs when students strive better to live up to their humanistic values. Positive preservation occurs when students observe, say, unprofessional behavior by an attending physician, reflect on the resultant dissonance, and choose to continue to hold their extant humanistic values and professional behavior. Fostering these considerations of professional behavior by students is the responsibility of all basic and clinical sciences departments. No single department should bear alone the possible negative student responses to such training (Brainard & Brislen, 2007; Leo & Eagen, 2008). In the fall of 2006, we began introducing into our medical biochemistry courses activities to foster student dissonance, critical reflection and professional behavior. This year, we introduced poems written by physicians to stimulate

South Dakota Medicine, 2017

English from a respected university. His literary interests were Protean, good writing nourished his soul and poetry was something he would quote from time to time bespeaking a unique understanding of contextual meaning. I was greatly disappointed, then, when a very early draft was met with the good doctor's scorn. He had other irons in the fire, he said, and had little patience for amateurish meddling in something so important.

Journal of Research in Nursing, 2017

The relationship between nursing and poetry is not necessarily obvious and may often be seen as marginal to mainstream nursing activities. This review paper seeks to examine this relationship by taking primarily an historical perspective, starting from Nightingale and the development of mainstream professional nursing. Through an indicative rather than exhaustive literature review, the ebb and flow of this relationship is traced. This provides both an overview and specific insights into the ways that poetry can manifest within nursing, highlighting some recent developments and the potential for further applications. As such the paper argues that poetry in its various forms should have more central consideration within nursing practice, education and research.

The 'literary' analysis of works of Hippocrates in antiquity, notably by Galen, on the basis of the so-called 'philological paradigm': the notion derived from the study of Homer that great authority goes hand in hand with literary and stylistic excellence.