Physicians’ notes are in some sense biographies of their patients. Those that are unwell have to be encouraged to find a narrative and the clinician has to tease out the significant lines in their story. It is the stories of private lives offered up to doctors, often at times of crisis and vulnerability, which explain, at least in part, why so many doctors are also novelists.
We should consider poetry and its less obvious role within the medical humanities. Like the novel, poetry can tell us about human experience, but it does this in its own language and not the more straightforward language of prose. It works by suggestion, but this doesn’t mean that it cannot console, teach, amuse, enlighten, mimic, disconcert and so much more. It can capture – or cause us to reconstruct – experiences and feelings that we might otherwise not be conscious
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The same is not always true of textbooks. And a corollary of this is that it doesn’t take much time to read a poem. But it does have to be read with a particular attention to detail, and that could be a useful training for medical students. You can’t race through a poem – as you might a textbook – looking for what you want to find. So we see the benefits of marrying poetry reading to various aspects of medicine. This is essentially what the National Association for Poetry Therapy has been doing for the past 30 years. It describes itself as “a community of healers and lovers of words”.
At the same time, there are various ways in which the humanities are enriched by disciplines within the medical sciences. Psychology can certainly play a part in both biography and biographical readings of literary texts, for example. Pharmacology can enlighten us in relation to drug-induced creative states of mind. More importantly, thinking about literature from the point of view of readers who may not be as set in their ways encourages the literary reader to read
When authors write medical narratives, they have to play the role of a doctor by using metaphors to explain to the readers what is happening to the
Dr. Vincent Lam is a profound Canadian physician and writer. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is his award winning novel that speaks on the reality of what it’s actually like to be in medical school aiming to be apart of a medical profession and the difficult expectations students must face while still managing to stay sane during those challenging years of their lives. It’s a collection of short stories partly based off of his experiences in the medical field, following the lives of fictional characters Ming, Fitzgerald, Chen, and Sri as they endure medical school and later work as doctors. Dr. Lam does a remarkable job at incorporating unique and compelling characters with intriguing storylines who face common and extraordinary moral dilemmas that seem to shape their overall characters. Lam introduces themes of love, fear, tradition, drugs, death, self doubt, duality, etc.
William Carlos Williams' Doctor Stories tell the realities of being a physician. The physicians in the Doctor Stories tell the careful balance that many doctors face throughout their careers. From addiction to lust, to more, doctors are humans with human emotions. William Carlos Williams proves that doctors can still perform their jobs despite interesting conditions. Through the expression of characters and slight sadness expressed in his short stories, coupled with his expressive poetry, William Carlos Williams conveys the feelings a doctor has that makes them no different than other people.
Selzer’s The Exact Location of the Soul captures the essence of being a physician by using first person point of view, a series of personal anecdotes, and such striking imagery.
The author constantly used short stories and visual description to get her thought across, entertain, and inform the reader. She told not only stories about medical findings but also about how the medical field works in general. One of the stories that stood out the most was the one about the socratic lectures that senior doctors would have with doctors-in-training to help them get a better understanding of treating real patients. She compared it to how medical school is now, filled with lectures and powerpoints of past patients, whereas back fifty years ago they had a more hands on experience. She wrote it in a way that was funny, comparing how “back in the day” you could actually look at a patient’s illness and now you have to see a slideshow of pictures and use that information to diagnose them, along with medical
Prominently featured in the mission statements of virtually of every medical school and medical institution in the world is the call for empathetic doctors. These institutions wish to train medical professionals that possess qualities of sympathy and compassion, and hospitals wish to employ health professionals that showcase similar qualities. The reality, however, is starkly different, as physicians, jaded by what they have seen in the medical world, lose the qualities that drove them to medicine in the first place. In Frank Huyler’s “The Blood of Strangers,” a collection of short stories from his time as a physician in the emergency room, Huyler uses the literary techniques of irony and imagery to depict the reality of the world of a medical professional. While Huyler provides several examples of both techniques in his accounts, moments from “A Difference of Opinion” and “The Secret” in particular stand out. Huyler uses irony and imagery in these two pieces to describe how medical professionals have lost their sense of compassion and empathy due to being jaded and desensitized by the awful incidents they have witnessed during their careers.
Many doctors are unable to face their own mortality. 2. In the beginning of the book, she notes to the reader that besides a few subjects and family members, she has changed the names and identifying details of her patients in order to maintain confidentiality. She does this because
ADHD, defiance disorder, pregnancy, these are just few of the things medicalized in the West (Davies 1995). With the rising prestige of Doctors in the 19th century, came a widening of the gap of knowledge between Doctors and the general population (Davies 1995). Doctors have kept a sort of lock on medical knowledge, enabling them to medicalize all sorts of “issues” aided by the idea of the medical mystique. But with the emergence of medicalization and cures that are being searched for by Doctors, a new problem has arisen. This fixation on curing illnesses has led to Doctors viewing patients as experiments and not as human beings, this is seen especially in technologically advanced societies as exemplified in the movie Wit. In addition to this new problem, there are clear establishments of hierarchy between medical professionals such as Doctors and nurses as well as the emotional detachments with the patients which can lead to patients feeling left out and alone.
Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.
William Carlos Williams’ passion and dedication of medicine can be seen through his literary contributions of short stories and poems. The Doctor Stories use interior monologue in a stream-of-consciousness as a tool to reflect each narrator’s experience and gives insight into the character and his appraisal of each of the situations encountered. It is through this stream-of-consciousness that we come to realize the observational nature of this doctor’s actions and thoughts.
Take a minute to imagine “Men looking like they had been/attacked repeatedly by a succession /of wild animals,” “never/ ending blasted field of corpses,” and “throats half gone, /eyes bleeding, raw meat heaped/ in piles.” These are the vividly, grotesque images Edward Mayes describes to readers in his poem, “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976.” Before even reading the poem, the title gave me a preconceived idea of what the poem might be about. “University of Iowa Hospital, 1976” describes what an extreme version of what I expected the poem to be about. The images I
The doctor-patient relationship always has been and will remain an essential basis of care, in which high quality information is gathered and procedures are made as well as provided. This relationship is a critical foundation to medical ethics that all doctors should attempt to follow and live by. Patients must also have confidence in their physicians to trust the solutions and work around created to counter act certain illnesses and disease. Doctor-patient relationships can directly be observed in both the stories and poems of Dr. William Carlos Williams as well as in the clinical tales of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Both of these doctors have very similar and diverse relationships with multiple patients
Scientific experimentation involves realistic reflections and measurable results, and results are usually proven when recurrences of the experiment have lead to the same conclusions. One could debate that the significance of a poem and the genuineness of that meaning are proven when reviewers and other readers identify the meaning in the poem, but that kind of perception fluctuates from one reader to another. And the practical utility that could emerge from the close reading of a poem, a greater precision in the readers'
“’I had a dream, a dream many of you may share: the dream to cure someone. ’”1 This quote from “Beyond the Glass” illustrates the passion physicians share for their patients and the drive they have to cure people. In Discovery Magazine’s “Behind the Glass,” author Daniel Weaver uses writing techniques such as imagery, characterization, and repetition of main ideas to demonstrate the unique and complex relationship a physician can have with a patient and disease.
Poetry is literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm, poems collectively or as a genre of literature. It is also a quality of beauty and intensity of emotion regarded as characteristic of poems. Poetry (poem) is something that follows a particular flow of rhythm and meter. Compare to prose, where there is no such restriction, and the content of the piece flows according to the story, a poem may or may not have a story, but definitely has structured method of writing.