Are the medical humanities for sale? Lessons from a historical debate (with Scott Podolsky) (original) (raw)
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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,
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
The medical humanities: literature and 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.
A tale of two cities: The influence of literature on medicine
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.