HumaneMedicine

June 30, 2010: Introductory Remarks

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia wrote a seminal book, called “Why Read?” on the importance of a liberal education.  His thesis is that “Reading literature nurtures our intelligence, our imagination, and our very soul.” He places literature at the very heart of a liberal-arts education, which he fears is becoming an endangered tradition. "The purpose of a liberal arts education,” he avers “is to give people an enhanced opportunity to decide how they should live their lives" and literature is "the major cultural source of vital options.”  Edmundson begins this notable book with these lines from physician-poet William Carlos William's poem Asphodel:

Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

For more of introductory remarks:  Download Summer Reading 2010

"Too much machinery, too much administration and not enough brains and intuition.  Research harbours a lot of second and third rate fellows.  Medicine needs more humanism and less science.  But humanism is hard work and so much science is just Tinkertoy."  Robertson Davies:  "The Cunning Man"

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Mother and Child (2010)

My sister, Barbara Nachman, was a feature editor at a newspaper before retiring.  She has a movie  blog called "Movie Slut Reviews" and recently featured "Mother and Child."  I saw the film on the basis of her recommendation and was not disappointed.  It is truly brilliant!

Please take advantage of the fact that it is at Images on Spring Street.  You will remember this film for decades.

Why Should Doctors Read Literature

Ian McEwan from "Atonement: (suggested by Larry Zaroff - Stanford University)

"For this was the point, surely: he would be a better doctor for having read literature. What deep readings his modified sensibility might make of human suffering, of the self-destructive folly or sheer bad luck that drive men toward ill health! Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall – this was the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too. He was thinking of the nineteenth-century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicously warm heart and cool judgement; his kind of doctor would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable; he would press the enfeebled pulse, hear the expiring breath, feel the fevered hand begin to cool and reflect, in the manner that only literature and religion teach, on the puniness and nobility of mankind."

William Osler: .